Jo Hepburn is a sculptor whose work explores the relationship between objects, encounter, and social and spatial systems.

Using improvisation, play, and failure, she makes sculptural propositions that do not simply disrupt space, but speak about it, attending to how space is activated, negotiated, and momentarily reconfigured.

Improvisation functions as both a method and a metaphor in her practice, inviting surprise and humour. Her assemblages often begin with familiar objects that are worked and reworked until gently unsettled. Using fragile and unruly materials, she builds forms that resist polish or finality, leaning instead into the awkward, the restrained, and the nearly coming undone.

Hepburn is interested in encounter as material: how the present moment can be shaped, funnelled, or held; how gestures leave traces; how memory might be reconstructed; and how the provisional can produce new knowledge. Her work moves between sincerity and absurdity, proposing making as an act of re-seeing.

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Jo Hepburn is the founder of The Crit Collective, an artist-led initiative 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 also a BA Fine Art lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire.