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.

SUMMER 2025 ARTIST RESIDENCIES

  • Leila is an Algerian-British artist using writing and film to share untold stories of homecoming. She'll be developing her next film, which will explore the role of family objects and forgotten traditions.

  • A UK-based artist who explores how art can address social issues, with a focus on wellbeing and the environment. Niki will be exploring new ways of taking her work forward in the form of exhibitions, immersive installations and live events.

  • An artist exploring queer history and personal storytelling, often focusing on the theme of the outsider and LGBTQ+ voices lost in archives. He'll be creating a new solo show on queer ageing, sparked by an unexpected Grindr ban.

  • A China-born, London-based artist exploring how design shapes power, perception, and behaviour. She'll be collaborating with architects to investigate how sound systems and scenography influence how we relate to each other.

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.

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.

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.