Jo Hepburn is a sculptor, her practice is material-led and moves through ideas of permeability, bodily edge and the uncertain boundary between inside and outside.

She makes precarious, bulbous sculptures using low status, everyday materials such as willow, pulp, drawings and short written fragments. She negotiates with material from inside and outside the studio. Gravity is not corrected but invited; surfaces absorb, swell, tear and re-harden. She reworks objects over and over, an act she call ‘re-membering’. 

Central to her practice is the notion of separation: she asks where a body ends and where an encounter ends, and whether they are separate at all. Making becomes a rehearsal space where play reveals how bodies and encounters seep into one another.

Sculptures function as provisional systems, structures that appear momentarily coherent yet remain susceptible to change. Boundaries between interior and exterior, support and supported, surface and core remain unstable. 

The work is humorous, un-heroic, and absurd. 

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​Jo Hepburn is the founder of The Crit Collective, an artist-led initiative in Gloucestershire, that supports experimental approaches to looking, talking, and thinking-with artworks. Alongside her studio practice, she facilitates crits that explore critique as a live, embodied, and relational act.

She is a Fine Art lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire.