Link-Detached

In January 2025 Jo Hepburn set herself a five-month intensive challenge: to make new work and stage her own exhibition. Link-Detached is the result.

In June 2025, Hepburn staged her debut solo exhibition in her studio-home in Cheltenham. Situated within a domestic setting, the project acted as both a culmination and a reworking of her ongoing sculptural-performance practice. The home-studio was not treated as a neutral backdrop but as an active condition, a rehearsal space, and a testing ground.

The house/studio became part rehearsal room, part set, part archive.

Sculptures leaned, slouched, balanced precariously on handles and domestic fixings. Objects waited their turn, relied on one another, risked collapse. They subtly dictated how visitors moved through the space, occasionally tripping them up. Nothing was fixed, resolved, or fully stable. Rather than presenting a finished statement, the exhibition invited encounter, an experience of things in process.

Link-Detached explored sculpture as score: a set of instructions, dependencies and contingencies that only fully emerge through use, time and proximity. Themes of risk, failure, co-dependence and humour ran throughout.

The exhibition text, 'An Interview with Clump', took the form of a semi-fictional dialogue, using absurdity to probe the porous boundaries between artwork and environment, form and function, performer and prop. Awkwardness operated as a deliberate strategy, pushing against the over-seriousness of conventional sculptural display. Meaning was not pinned down but allowed to wobble, held open in the gap between the familiar and the strange.

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All images courtesy of Millie Elliot.