Crip (2021 - ongoing)

“Poetry is not the same to the ill, the clouds look different, and so too does the rest of nature” Alice Hattrick

Since 2021 Longhurst has been developing new works which engage with the idea of crip time – a theory at the intersection of feminist, disability, and queer studies that addresses the ways that the disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill encounter time and space differently to others. These explorations stem from a consideration of a series of 19th century photographic portraits of sick women and metaphorically implement bindweed – a considered undesirable and marginalised plant, recognised for its tenacity and idiosyncratic characteristic of growing in an anticlockwise direction – as her own disabled experience.

The project was introduced as a Hapax Commission in 2022. A solo exhibition Summer 2023 at Studio Voltaire, London premiered a small selection of Crip collages and the moving image work Here, Now – a portait made in collaboration with a collective of artists who live with unseen conditions. In 2024, Longhurst created In Plain Sight?, a public art commision at the Manchester Medical School to draw attention to the services the University provides to support staff and students with unseen disabilities and chronic health conditions. In 2025 Longhurst was commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts to make new large-scale works for the Crip project, and to undertake a residency in their Print Studio, as part of the We Contain Multitudes project. This resulted in a major group exhibition at DCA in 2026. The project continues to evolve as new works are added.

Work in progress includes archive research, sound explorations and self-portraiture.

Crip has been made possible through the generous support of a-n Artists Bursaries; Arts Council England; Ben Cove Award, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Lisa Slominski.