King's Culture launched a seed fund open to Early Career Researchers (ECRs) from across King's, to enable development of a project proposal with an artist. The scheme offers enhanced support to Early Career Researchers to develop new collaborations to advance research enquiry and public engagement with research. In keeping with King’s ambition to accelerate research, education and action across the university to enable environmental sustainability, proposals should address the theme of 'Sustainability' in a broad sense.
This fund will pay £610 for the artists' time* to work with the researcher to develop a proposal for a collaborative project that would either develop outputs oriented towards a public audience and/or seed research ideas suitable for a larger funding bid.
This funding is intended to give the researcher and artist time to understand each others' area of work, explore areas for future collaboration, and develop a proposal for a collaborative project. The scheme will also offer a dedicated ‘culture surgery’ session with a member of King’s Culture to help develop the project proposal.
Applications are now closed.
Applications to the seed fund were assessed on:
- rationale for wishing to develop a collaboration
- potential for innovative ideas and outputs to emerge
- area of research
Eligible researchers must be ‘early career’ - i.e. doctoral students and researchers and academic staff up to 8 years post-PhD. The scheme is open to any UK-based artist/creative practitioner working in any medium, though is most likely to appeal to emerging artists with an interest in collaborating with a researcher. We aim to support a range of proposals from across King's College London faculties.
Alongside the fund, we held a networking event for researchers to meet artists and a series of workshops on how to develop a collaborative creative research project.
[*We anticipate this will cover 2 days of artists time, based on the Artists Union England recommended hourly rate of £38.01, for artists with 5+ years experience]
Successful applicants will be notified in mid-June, and will have until 31 July 2023 to work with their creative partner write up their project proposal.
We anticipate we will support up to 12 applications.
Proposed projects might include: development of a small-scale collaborative work of art; development of an event; research and development time exploring ideas for submission to a major funder.
We anticipate this will be the first stage of a collaboration process, with further opportunities to work together and produce creative work supported through King’s Culture.
For examples of how creative collaboration can work, please look at some previous academic/artist collaborations through our King’s Artists residencies.
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Please contact laura.laimable@kcl.ac.uk with any questions on the ECR Creative Collaboration Seed Fund.