Congratulations to SPACE studio artist Jo Longhurst who has won the inaugural Ben Cove Award. Jo receives £1,000 towards her practice, plus one-to-one mentoring with Karen Davies, Head of Artist Development.

Melanie Cove, who was on the selection panel, says: “We are very appreciative of the ongoing warmth that the artists at SPACE, and the wider community, have shown us since Ben’s unexpected and untimely death. It is with heartfelt thanks to them, and the team at SPACE, that we have been able to make the Ben Cove Award possible. We were thrilled to welcome Jo Bushnell from Aspex as our guest panel member, and privileged to receive some exceptional applications from artists at SPACE for the inaugural Ben Cove Award. Congratulations to Jo Longhurst who is a very worthy winner and we look forward to seeing Ben’s legacy in the future work of another SPACE artist.”

Jo Longhurst’s practice explores and critiques traditions of portraiture through a combination of photography, sculptural elements, moving image, performance, and installation. Interested in both physical and psychological experiences, she questions theories of eugenics, representation, gender, power, and control.

Jo is an artist who works slowly – and often collaboratively – on long-term bodies of work. Her projects develop through the creation of a series of individual artworks which create a dialogue with the audience, and with each other. Her best-known projects The Refusal and Other Spaces are, on the surface, case studies of the competitive world of the show dog and the elite gymnast. These works investigate the act of looking and being looked at; how we judge and are judged; and how we attempt to fit in – gently probing how cultural ideas of perfection shape personal and national identities, as well as social and political systems.

Crip is a new direction in her practice which for the first time publicly acknowledges her lived experience of unseen disability. She has been developing ideas which engage with crip time, a theory which elaborates how the disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill experience time and space differently to others.

These explorations metaphorically implement bindweed – a considered undesirable and marginalised plant, recognised for its tenacity and idiosyncratic characteristic of growing in an anticlockwise direction. My research considers agency, visibility, movement, and performance by juxtaposing the bindweed metaphor with the lingering legacy of a series of 19th century photographs of patients, diagnosed as hysteric and held in various European medical institutions. A moving image work Here, Now made with a collective of women and non-binary artists who live with a diverse range of unseen conditions was exhibited in Summer 2023.

Plans for new work include multi-part collages, wallpapers, self-portraiture, and sculptural light installations.