Introduction
Creative physics was initiated and supported by the Physics Department’s former head, Professor Ian Shipsey, with the aim of exploring the creative interface between scientific and artistic endeavour. To date, work created here has illuminated and informed both the scientists and artists involved in creating new work at the interface of physics and art. The exploration of this interface has proven illuminating not only for those involved in the creative process but also for the participants in the many creative offshoots born from this work. It has also proven successful in appealing to a wide audience beyond the traditional confines of scientific and artistic work.
Pamela Davis Kivelson (PDK)
Artist in Residence, 2023-2025
A renowned contemporary artist in science faculties in America and beyond, Pamela currently holds a similar position at Q-FARM at Stanford University. In the Department of Physics at Oxford she has worked with a diverse range of students, staff, and faculty members, interviewing her subjects to inform her work. As well as academics and researchers within the Department of Physics, PDK has collaborated with award-winning composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford’s Oriel College.
Conversations Across Time
These collaborations resulted in a series of ‘un-plays’ under the umbrella Conversations Across Time. The first un-play took place in June 2023, using quantum principles and the algorithms applicable to define the event horizons of black holes. These were then applied to art as a way of looking at and challenging the way we perceive ourselves and others:
Entangled with the Ashmolean
The second un-play, Entangled with the Ashmolean ('CAT2'), took place in June 2024 in the Cast gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, then workshopped in the offices of Quantinuum. This piece sought to explore portraiture, women in science, and the Quantum future:
The Physics of Loss
The final un-play in this series. performed in June 2025, was Quantum Apparitions: The Physics of Loss. This work took inspiration from the LA fires and the concept of loss in physics and in life, fuelling discussion, reflections, and re-imaginings about portraiture and black holes.
The producer was Helen Smith, and the cast were Giovanni De Felice, Katharina Lasinger, Xiangying Ye, Mindao Yang, and Alex Brogan. The audience participants all had great fun creating and collaborating during the un-play to produce their own portraits which were at once washed away.
Affiliated Artists
Cheryl Frances-Hoad
Cheryl Frances-Hoad received her musical education at the Yehudi Menuhin School, Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, and Kings College London.
Chosen to be a featured composer on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Composer of the Week’ (Five under 35, March 2015), her works have garnered many awards, from the BBC Lloyds Bank Composer of the Year award when she was just 15 to more recently The RPS Composition Prize, The Mendelssohn Scholarship, and three Ivor Novello (formally BASCA) British Composer Awards (for Psalm 1 and Stolen Rhythm in 2010, and Scenes from the Wild in 2022).
Kathy Selby
Kathy Selby is an alumna of Somerville College and UC Berkeley. Her physics research fields have included alkali metal clusters and MRI of atherosclerosis, aneurysms and osteoporosis. Kathy’s career in physics has supported her lifelong music habit - playing violin, piano, flute, and singing.
Acting credits include Fiddler in Mary Queen Of Scots Got Her head Chopped Off (Viaduct Theatre, San Francisco), and recently, Squidward in SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical (Baltimore Drama Group, Cork). While on the faculty of Cornell University, Kathy’s music and physics worlds underwent a joyous collision teaching the Physics of Musical Sound.
Kathy, her violin and her music, were vital to the success and continuity of The Physics of Loss, where she collaborated closely with PDK and the cast to produce a unique soundscape for the un-play.
Quantum in Pictures
This new approach to quantum mathematics and computing is the brainchild of Stefano Gogioso and Bob Coecke, Chief Scientific Officer of Quantinuum and close creative collaborator with the department.
In May 2025 the department hosted a lecture by Muhammad Hamza Waseem and attended by Bob to further spread the word about Quantum in Pictures.
As well as hosting the workshop A new way to understand the quantum world in summer 2024, Bob has his own band, Black Tish, and is currently working on a quantum guitar. Bob has also collaborated with composer and theorist Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin on new quantum music. Bob and Rakhat will be performing at the DESY Quantum Music Concert in Berlin in July.
The Future
Professor Shipsey and the department of Physics were not fully aware of how great an impact Creative Physics, inspiring artistic collaboration along scientific principles across the faculty, the University community, and beyond.
Most recently the department has hosted a ½ day symposium organised by Seb Wilkes, a PhD student in the department, to explore the concept of “Emergence” where speakers shared their research and used this to explain how it has shaped their understanding of ‘emergence’ in physics, plotting a course into the humanities to search for common threads.
Anyone interested in exploring their own creative self or who has a sci-art project in mind please email events@physics.ox.ac.uk