Cavendish Arts Science Fellowship at Girton College

Applications are open for the third 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. We welcome applications from artists working in disciplines including visual arts, performance, theatre, film, writing, dance, music and sound, and those with spatial, social, technology, digital and experimental practices. Artists with no previous experience working with scientists or in a scientific environment are particularly encouraged to apply. 

The Cavendish Arts Science programme 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 the traditional centring of voices and ways of knowing. Our programme creates new spaces to re-imagine material and immaterial universes. We are seeking adventurous artists whose practice resonates with our ethos of questioning, collective imagining and decentring.

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, and artist and composer Ain Bailey, our current Artist Fellow, who is currently in residence in Cambridge. Ain brings her interest in multi-channel sound, architectural acoustics and the constellation of sounds that form individual and community identities to her encounters with physicists. Insights into their experience of the fellowship can be found on our website. 

The 2023/24 fellowship will last one year from October 2023 and will include a residency period in Cambridge, typically of at least six months up to one year, with potential for the period of residency to be split across two visits.

The successful applicant will:

• Develop thought-provoking ideas through engagement with physicists and those in other fields.
• Experiment with new approaches to their practice that are transformative and push boundaries.
• Produce new work to be exhibited during the fellowship and beyond.
• Have opportunities to exhibit work in other contexts including the opening of the Cavendish Laboratory (Ray Dolby Centre) in 2024, and potentially those created through national and international partnerships.

Financial support

• A stipend of 10,000 GBP will be paid to the successful candidate.
• All accommodation and meals will be provided by Girton College during the residency in Cambridge.
• A budget of 10,000 GBP will be made available to support the development of new work.
• Travel to and from Cambridge for the residency period will be paid for up to 3,000 GBP.

About Cavendish Arts Science
The Cavendish Arts Science programme was founded in 2016 by Suchitra Sebastian, head of the Quantum Materials group, building on an extensive history of art-science engagement at the Cavendish Laboratory.

Our ethos
Questioning: We engage artists who bring alternative ways of knowing the world and create work that questions and disrupts the status quo. 
Collective imagining: We bring together artists and scientists to collectively imagine in new ways that defy conventional thinking and open new spaces of enquiry. 
Decentring: We work with artists with practices immersed in communities that are not privileged in the mainstream.

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 range from understanding space and the origin of the universe, to exploring time, matter and energy in all its forms and at every scale, from the very large to the inconceivably small. In 2024, the Cavendish Laboratory will be moving to its new state-of-the-art and purpose-built home, the Ray Dolby Centre.