Cavendish Arts Science Fellowship at Girton College

Applications are open for the Cavendish Arts Science Fellowship at Girton College. This unique collaborative opportunity is open to artists internationally and is not confined to any single aesthetic, theme or medium.

Artists with no previous experience of working with scientists or in a scientific environment are particularly encouraged to apply.

We are seeking adventurous artists who explore alternative ways of knowing the world, and who work with communities that are not privileged in the mainstream. The Fellowship offers opportunities for playful experimentation, and the space to re-imagine beyond conventional artistic and scientific boundaries.

Previous Cavendish Arts Science Fellows include experimental filmmaker Logan Dandridge who brought specific interests in memory, non-linear time and Black experience to his dialogues with physicists, artist and composer Ain Bailey whose interest in multi-channel sound, architectural acoustics and sonic autobiographies informed her fellowship, and artist and dancer Robert Ssempijja, our current Fellow. Ssempijja’s “regenerative art practice” explores the past, present and future in a way that re-imagines traditional exploitative narratives, while confronting decolonial questions about the nature of home and belonging. Insights into the experience of previous fellows can be found on our website.

The one-year fellowship will begin in October 2024 and end in October 2025, with a residency period in Cambridge typically of at least six months up to one year. Exact dates of the residency period are flexible and will be agreed with the selected artist.

Application deadline: Sunday May 19, 2024, 11:59pm British Summer Time (GMT+1). For more information and to apply: visit here.

About Cavendish Arts Science and the Fellowship
Cavendish Arts Science creates collective encounters between art and science that explore the world, our humanity, and our place in the world. We support artistic work that questions traditional centring of voices and ways of knowing; our programme creates new spaces to re-imagine material and immaterial universes.

Our ethos
Experimenting: We engage with adventurous artists who explore alternative ways of knowing the world, and create work that questions and disrupts the status quo through a playful and experimental approach. Decentring: We work with artists whose creative practices are immersed in communities that are not privileged in the mainstream. Re-imagining: We create spaces of re-imagination, where new and unfamiliar forms emerge in radically different ways, transcending conventional artistic and scientific boundaries.

The Cavendish Arts Science Fellowship supports our ethos. It is designed for artists to develop thought-provoking ideas through engagement with physicists and those in other fields, and to experiment with new approaches to their practice that are transformative and push boundaries.

It is delivered through a partnership between Cavendish Arts Science, an initiative of the Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge and Girton College, University of Cambridge, thanks to the vision and support of Una Ryan.

The fellowship is financially supported: 
–10,000 GBP stipend paid to the artist towards living costs and expenses
–Rent-free accommodation and meals provided at Girton College during the residency period in Cambridge 
–Travel budget of up to 3,000 GBP (depending on where the artist is based) will be made available to support the cost of travel to/from Cambridge
–Production budget of 10,000 GBP will be made available to support the development of new work arising from the Fellowship

About the Cavendish Laboratory
The Cavendish Laboratory has an extraordinary history of discovery and innovation in Physics since its opening in 1874. Research in the Cavendish has been instrumental in our understanding of the physical world, from creating theories of electromagnetism and discovering the electron, to splitting the nucleus, and developing x-ray crystallography to see inside the atom. Today, fundamental questions addressed by research in the laboratory explore time, space, matter and energy in various forms and scales, from the very large to the inconceivably small. The Cavendish Laboratory will move into its state-of-the-art new home, the Ray Dolby Centre, in 2024.