Open to current SPACE studio artists

Eligibility

To be eligible for the award, you must be a current SPACE Studio artist and identify as having a disability, including neurodiversity. 

Deadline midnight on Monday 1 December 2025

APPLY HERE

(Please contact artistdevelopment@spacestudios.org.uk if you have any access needs regarding your application. An online Q&A session to answer all your application questions will take place on Zoom on Tuesday 7 October from 6.30 – 7.30pm)

The Estate of Ben Cove and SPACE are delighted to announce the Ben Cove Award 2026. The selected artist will receive a £1,000 award and mentoring support from Karen Davies, Head of Artist Development at SPACE.

Ben (1974 – 2016) was an integral part of the SPACE artist community and the London art scene, spending 10 years working in The Triangle building in Hackney from 2006 until his untimely death in 2016. Early in 2016, with his career in its ascendancy, Ben was awarded a Breathing SPACE Bursary, allowing him a six-month rent break and affording him the time to work towards a solo show titled Double Dutch, which was realised posthumously at Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth. In 2024, Melanie Cove and Karen Davies curated Ben Cove in SPACE at SPACE Gallery to coincide with the first Ben Cove Award.

The SPACE community is integral to the existence of this award. It was the SPACE community of friends and fellow artists who instigated a collection in Ben’s name, with the specific aim of enabling artists to further their careers by removing some of the financial constraints. We look forward to continuing to celebrate Ben’s artistic and personal legacy through the Ben Cove Award 2026. 

The selection panel consists of the Cove family, SPACE Head of Artist Development Karen Davies, and George Vasey, Curator, Lecturer and Writer.

The Ben Cove Award 2024 winner, Jo Longhurst, said of her award:

I was very moved to have been awarded the inaugural Ben Cove Award – in particular by the fact that the judges, including Ben’s family, gave such recognition to work dealing with the challenges faced by those of us who live with unseen conditions. 

I used the award to develop new ideas for my Crip project, exploring new technical and aesthetic ways forward, and creating a series of detailed workbooks to draw on for future works.

I particularly love that Ben expanded the application of painting into, onto, and beyond other mediums, and the way he used archival images as a starting point for very necessary discussions about how we live today. I’m working to continue his legacy by developing multidisciplinary works which agitate for recognition of the barriers we face, to make visible the social and economic exclusion of the disabled, and to create empathy for a more sustainable, equitable future.