Jo Cope — Artist Bio

Jo Cope (b. 1972, Leicestershire, United Kingdom) is a multidisciplinary artist based in the UK. Working across installation, performance, film, and participatory practice, her work employs footwear as a sculptural and conceptual device through which embodiment, agency, and gendered experience are negotiated. Cope’s practice is grounded in craft methodologies, drawing on materials such as leather and wood that carry historical and symbolic relationships to the body.

Central to Cope’s work is the framing of the shoe as a vessel for examining the human condition. Walking operates as both a conceptual structure and a lived action, with the foot positioned as a site of decision‑making, pressure, and orientation. Through the construction of sculptural artefacts and performative devices, her work invites embodied forms of learning, encouraging audiences to engage through participatory action.

Elements of performance, moving image, photography, historical reference, and therapeutic apparatus are often integrated, generating environments that hold tension between care and constraint, endurance and agency. Feminism operates here as a bodily sensation and material language, emphasising labour, repetition, and gendered forms and pressures.

Recent projects include Walking on Water, a rooftop performance for the Venice Design Biennial; Shoes Have Names, a collaborative project developed with the UK homelessness charity Shelter; Not All Roses Are Romantic, an installation and live performance at the Garden Museum, London; and No Woman Is an Island of Shoes, a multi‑space installation presented as part of the Velenje Festival, Slovenia.

Cope has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest; the Garden Museum, London; and Z33 – House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Belgium. Her work is held in public and institutional collections including the Shoe Museum, Northamptonshire; Museu do Calçado, Portugal; and Galerija Velenje, Slovenia.

For loan enquiries: info@jocope.com