Jo Longhurst 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. Collaborative works with show dogs and gymnasts 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. In her most recent body of work Crip, Longhurst works with bindweed – an undesirable, marginalised plant, which grows in an anti-clockwise direction – and 19C photographic portraits of female patients to explore the concept of crip time, a theory at the intersection of feminist, disability, and queer studies which elaborates how the disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill experience time and space differently to others.
Jo‘s work is held in public and private collections and is exhibited internationally. In 2012 she was awarded the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange Prize (now the AIMIA/AGO Photography Prize), Canada’s highest award for excellence in international photography, for her ongoing bodies of work The Refusal and Other Spaces. In 2015 she worked with rhythmic gymnasts in a social project in Rio de Janeiro, developing a new body-scanning technique to visualize movement. The resulting archive formed the basis for a new body of work New Order. In 2018 she was commissioned to make 4 new moving image and performance works for the Cultural Programme of the European Sports Championships in Glasgow & Perth. In 2020 this work was shortlisted for the SpallArt Prize, hosted by the Salzburger Kunstverein. Her work has won many other awards including the Ben Cove Award; National Media Museum Photography Bursary; Pavilion Commission and selection for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and the Discovery Award, Arles.
‘Her combination of appropriated, re-presented images alongside photographic, time-based and sculptural elements reinvigorate a relationship to still photographic images by variously extending their volume, scale and dimension in space.’ Sophie Hackett, Art Gallery of Ontario.
Jo’s art patron scheme BowWowWow offers bespoke canine portraits inspired by her body of work The Refusal, which explores the intimate relationship between human and dog.
Photo © Jo Longhurst
