ARTIST RESIDENCIES

Develop your artistic practice with a SPILL Artist Residency. You will receive a dedicated space to research and develop new ideas, new thinking and project project development in our White Room. Each residency is bespoke, tailored to the needs of you or your company.

Applications for Summer 2025 Residencies are now open.

SPILL Think Tank Artist Residencies: Summer 2025

30 June - 25 July 2025

We are excited to announce that we are opening up space at the SPILL Think Tank, Ipswich for another series of artist residencies. If you’d like to spend a week in our White Room, researching and developing a new idea, then we’d love to hear from you. We provide an honorarium of £1000 for each residency, and the deadline for applications is Monday 28 April at 12pm.

Up to one week free residency space in our White Room between 30 June to 25 July 2025. Our residency weeks are usually 5 days, running from Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm.
- Mentoring/advice from our experienced SPILL staff.
- Access to tech and equipment including a PA system, projection equipment and Wi-Fi. We also have an enormous whiteboard for you to work through your ideas.
- The option of an informal sharing of ideas at the end of the week to an invited audience. This is not mandatory, but could be a facilitated conversation, a work in progress sharing or just a chat with some of the SPILL staff about where you’re up to in your process. We will work with you to make sure you have a productive and useful culmination to your residency.
- An honorarium of £1000 per residency. You can use this to cover your fee, travel and accommodation if needed, but also materials or input from collaborators or mentors.
- A fund for access requirements is available, so do state any access needs in your application so we can support you properly.
- These residencies are intended for solo, self-producing artists, although you can be working with collaborators. We ask that a named artist applies in the first instance.
- We are looking for people interested in the research and development of ideas and, as such, these residencies are not suitable as rehearsal space for works that are already made or about to be presented elsewhere.
- We’re interested in artists who align with our artistic vision at SPILL - please take some time to explore our website where you can see our recent projects https://www.spillfestival.com/, as well as our curatorial statement: https://www.spillfestival.com/how-we-curate. We are particularly interested in artists who incorporate any of the following forms in their work:
  - Digital art
  - Experimental Sound + Music
  - Experimental Theatre
  - Film + Video
  - Installation
  - Participatory Practice
  - Spoken Word + Text
- We do not provide travel and accommodation, but the honorarium may be used for this purpose.
- We do not offer residencies to those in full time education.
- Please apply by completing this application form. The form will ask you to provide a brief bio (up to 150 words) and a short proposal (up to 300 words) summarising what you would like to use the week for. Please include links to website/documentation, highlighting material relevant to your proposal.
- Please state which week(s) you would ideally like to come, and any access requirements.
- Please tell us how you intend to spend the £1,000 residency budget. In this answer, you may want to consider travel, accommodation and materials costs alongside your artist fee. We expect to see a minimum of £500 go towards your fee, but also expect any collaborators, mentors, or ‘outside eye’ advisors to be paid a fair hourly rate for their time, including for participation in online meetings.
- Due to the expected high level of interest, we cannot guarantee residency time to all who contact us, but keep an eye on our website as we will be offering additional residency opportunities in the near future.
- Please be aware we usually share details of the artists in residence on our website and social media, and we will ask successful applicants to provide us with appropriate imagery for this purpose.
- If you have any questions or require further information, please contact SPILL’s General Manager, Kathryn Kirton: info@spillfestival.com or 01473 216 545.
Deadline for applications: Monday 28 April 12pm

Click here to apply to a Summer 2025 Residency

WINTER 2025 ARTIST RESIDENCIES

Nat is an audio-visual participatory artist exploring creative technologies to craft interactive, sensory experiences. Their residency will develop a playable sonic work inspired by e-textiles, fairground games, and co-created musical scores.
Simone French is a queer experimental performance artist and theatremaker originally from Naarm (Melbourne) with over a decade of international practice. Her work embraces her wacky sensibility, DIY methodology and inventive use of space with a focus on devising theatre that combines AV, film, music, dance with audience interactivity. Simone is the Co-Artistic Director of the company TomYumSim that aims to push the envelope of theatre by not shying away from the provocative and has made 13 projects to date - including highlights; Green Room Award winner A Suffocating Choking Feeling (Pleasance Theatre/La Mama), exploring influencer culture and the ethics of faking cancer online by mixing live performance with live streaming on Instagram; Hotline (Word of Warning/MIF), a subversive live one-to-one phone performance; String Lines (Royal Exchange Theatre), an immersive electronic pop opera where the audience conducts the space and The Salon (Cambridge Junction/Bridgewater Hall), an interactive singing hair salon focusing on self-care
for dementia patients and queer youth.
Simone will be using her week at the Think Tank to explore her new project Trainwreck – a satirical take on AI’s role in creativity – exploring whether it can enhance, rather than replace artistic expression. Inspired by infamous AI-driven flops like Willy’s Chocolate Experience 2024, She’ll experiment with AI as a creative collaborator, exploring whether it enhances or undermines artistic authenticity.
A multi-media artist and documentary filmmaker who has lived and worked worldwide. He will be using his residency to explore changing practices around death, and our experiences of grieving.
Emily is developing The Dunwich Charter, which seeks to build on The London Charter (Denard, 2012). It will offer a framework for immersive storytelling experiences in the cultural heritage sector, responding to the age of environmental crisis to create a guiding set of principles.

SUMMER 2024 ARTIST RESIDENCIES

Esme is an artist who uses textile techniques, found objects, and text in installations exploring memory and trauma. She used the residency to research mult-sensory installations and the ways audiences can interact with them.
Rosanna is an artist, England futsal player (indoor variant of football) and coach based in London. Their work recreates the passion and movement of football and futsal through line, text, spoken word poetry and outreach workshops. They used their residency to explore interactivity, write a new spoken word piece, and integrate improvised movement that incorporates drawing while moving with a ball at their feet.
Rea is a performer and performance-maker who is passionate about creating performance that harnesses the body's expressive power.
During their residency they worked with a dancer named Daisy to devise new work.
Maria is a director, live artist and costume designer working in performance, art, theatre, dance and film.
They used their residency to work on their work “Bees and Beasts and the Horrish Fishtales”, a tragicomedy live art piece exploring themes of pain, pollination and captivity.

Two people kneeling, performing in front of a screen in a room with audio equipment.

Person in green bee suit holding a pelvis model indoors.

Person in orange sweatshirt drawing colorful abstract lines on a whiteboard.

Person sitting at a desk with art supplies and a sketchbook, smiling.

SPRING 2024 ARTIST RESIDENCIES

A writer, artist and producer based in Norwich, Flo’s debut book of poetry, the other body, was published by Guillemot Press in 2021. Their residency focused on developing experimental poems for performance, questioning the neurotypical conventions of position, subjectivity, gender, and the gaze.
A multi-sensory theatremaker and facilitator based in Suffolk, Kirsty spent her residency time researching a new autobiographical project called Brown Babies, about the lives of the mixed race children fathered by American servicemen stationed locally.
Based in Cambridge and working across music technology, digital art, film-making and live performance, Lawrence is a synaesthete who sees music in colour. He used his residency to explore new forms of live installation which could share these heightened experiences with others.
Veteran performance artist Richard Layzell visited SPILL to research his own Ipswich ancestry and develop its connection to a new work, Psychosomatic, which is being created to help different generations come to terms with climate change and species loss.

Woman sitting at a wooden table with papers and markers, checking her phone, near a microphone stand and laptop.

SUMMER 2023 ARTIST RESIDENCIES

Matt Shenton is an experimental musician who records and performs under the artist moniker of ‘there are no birds here’. He has recorded work inspired and informed by the Suffolk landscape (and particularly that of the Shotley Peninsula) for five years and has been lucky to have had physical and digital releases on micro record labels in the UK and Finland.
Born in Romania, Andreea moved to Ipswich aged 10. She spent 5 years training in acting and performance in Paris, Estonia and Mexico (with Ipswich-based Gecko, amongst others). Her work focuses on the material, linguistic and cultural realities of being a migrant.
Giovanna Maria Casetta is an Ipswich based Artist and Educator working in performance, 8mm film and installation. A constant theme running through her work is is the tension between the Surface and what lies beneath.
Miche Fabre Lewin creates food rituals with participants and communities from around the world, incorporating sound, video, performance and photography with the rituals.

Matthew Shenton (a white man with blonde hair and glasses, wearing a dark hoodie) leans over a modulator, looking carefully at the controls

Andreea Tudose, a white woman wearing a simple white sundress and her dark hair in a bun, washes a long piece of fabric in an outdoor fountain as part of her performance The Washerwomen

Giovanna Maria Casetta, a white woman with short dark hair, looks at the camera with her head leaning on her right hand

A close up of a chopped red cabbage in a bowl, mixed together with other leaves and vegetables

SPRING 2023 ARTIST RESIDENCIES

‘What gives us pleasure?’ and what is ‘too much?’. The brain registers all pleasures in the same way, whether it is drugs, food, sexual encounters or little hearts on Instagram - but what happens when we dabble with excess?
Performance artist and producer Katie is using her residency to explore these questions as part of the development process for her new solo show ‘Get Off’.
Maddie is a conceptual artist interested in history, stories and philosophy. She is research and project based, working across sculpture, painting, installation, film, performance, text and drawing.
Her residency will be used to develop ideas around performance, female rage and screaming, to create a new film called Scream Karaoke.
2023 is the 140th year since the death of Suffolk-based Victorian poet Edward Fitzgerald, most famous for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyáam. His personal life was shrouded with scandal surrounding his sexuality.
During his residency, Leon will discuss, explore, and test some creative collaboration ideas around Fitzgerald’s life and work with five other artists.
Rosa Torr is a theatre practitioner and radio producer living and working in Norwich.
Her residency will explore explore graphs, charts and language associated with meteorology and weather prediction, developing an artistic response to the climate crisis.
Kara Jarrold is a researcher, cultural practitioner and maker living in Ipswich. She is part of the Make Play collective who are interested in making large scale, multi-layered sensory environments to engage curiosity.
This residency will be used to work on a new project with Ipswich families that will ignite creativity and imaginations in the Early Years.

Edward Fitzgerald - the subject of Leon Clowes new work (Copy)

SUMMER 2022 ARTIST RESIDENCIES

8 - 12 August 2022
Helen is an Ipswich based artist with a background working in the field of adoption and foster care. She used her residency to investigate a new direction in her creative life, involving interactive and immersive approaches. The writing and drawing she produced explored intergenerational refugee perspectives from her family history relative to contemporary situations of conflict and displacement.
15 - 19 August 2022
Lucy is an artist and independent producer based in Lowestoft. She used her residency to investigate herring - a fish with a huge social and economic impact in British and local history. Her research looked into the ‘Herring Lasses’, and the relationship these women working within the fishing industry had on feminist movements in the early 20th Century. Lucy’s week in residence was also informed by her interest in the impact of overfishing and the decline of British seaside towns from the 1970s.
22 - 26 August 2022
Rose is a composer working across the genres of electronic and ambient music. She relocated from Amsterdam to Suffolk for the duration of her residency, connecting remotely with Iceland based artist Heiða Árnadóttir. During the week of residency, they collaborated to explore text, vocal iteration and dramaturgy as well as aspects of movement, instrumentation and light design for an ongoing sound and performance project.
30 Aug - 2 Sep 2022
Kate is a Suffolk based digital visual artist working with moving image and installation. She has had an extensive career predominantly in collaboration creating dance film, video design and documentary. Having undertaken a period working with analogue forms such as 16mm film and camera-less filmmaking, Kate used her SPILL residency to explore different modes of exhibition, trialing an installation that used a variety of digital technologies. Her particular interest was in the potential of video projection and spatial audio.