Output details

Other Spaces

Other Spaces is a collection of 11 original visual artworks made over 4 years working closely with British Gymnastics and the International Gymnastics Federation. The lens-based works include photographs, sculptural installations and projections, video, and performance is the outcome of an interrogation of the physical and emotional experiences of elite gymnasts in training and competition. Inspired by Plato’s “perfect solids” and Popova & Rodchenko’s revolutionary experiments with aesthetic forms, Longhurst then worked with a body of original photographic source material - sketches & studies made as visiting artist at Heathrow Gymnastic club, 2008-10, and the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, 2009 - to create hybrid installation works, which reference earlier attempts to define and create Perfect worlds. Highlighting the personal and ideological work involved with competitive gymnastics, and the mediation of lens-based media in the creation of the gymnastic spectacle and specifically concerned with the idea of technical perfection, Longhurst interrogates the process of training through a process of making in, order to analyse the pursuit of perfection and, in so doing to question how a training regime of repetition and duration might play out in the making of an artwork. Within this exploration of the training process, the interconnectedness of the mind and the physical body, alongside the voluntary and involuntary aspects of the relationship between intuition and “animal instinct” as vital to success of focused “thinking” required to prepare and perform complicated routines. Other Spaces also questions the role of the artwork in the interplay of intuition, instinct and rational thought. As Artist in Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2012, Longhurst worked with a team of elite Canadian gymnasts and Elena Davidova (ex -Soviet Olympic Champion 1980, and current Olympic coach at Gemini Gymnastics club, Oshawa) to further develop the project through portraiture and video installation.