RESIDENCIES

CURRENT OPPORTUNITIES / PREVIOUS RESIDENCIES

SPILL Think Tank residencies provide dedicated space for artists to research and develop new ideas and projects in our White Room. Each residency is bespoke, tailored to the individual needs of each artist or company.

SPILL residencies support new ideas, new thinking, new project development and focused time for artistic research.


10th February - 7th March 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.

WINTER 2025 RESIDENCIES

    • Up to one week free residency space in our White Room between 10th February and 7th March 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 wifi. 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 by no means 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 £150 per residency.

    • A fund for access requirements is available, so do state any access needs in your application and we can discuss this with you.

    • 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, with live performance at the heart of their work, whilst also incorporating any of the following categories:

      • Digital art

      • Experimental Sound + Music

      • Experimental Theatre

      • Film + Video

      • Installation

      • Participatory Practice

      • Spoken Word + Text

    • We do not provide travel and accommodation, so artists local to the SPILL Think Tank in Ipswich and East Anglia will be prioritised. 

    • Please apply by completing the relevant Google form. Please include 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 also state which week(s) you would ideally like to come, and any access requirements.

    • 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.

    • If you have any questions or require further information, please contact SPILL’s General Manager, Kathryn Kirton: kathryn@spillfestival.com or 01473 216 545.

    • Deadline for applications: 12 noon, Monday 9th December 2024.


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.

  • 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.

PREVIOUS ARTIST RESIDENCIES

SPRING 2024


SUMMER 2023

  • 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.

SPRING 2023

  • ‘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.

SUMMER 2022

  • 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.