Penelope Cain is an artist with a research science background working at the science-art intersection in a speculative and open-ended storytelling mode.
She is interested expanded storytellings of the Anthropocene and Post-Carbon. Drawing from scientific research, her art practice is located between scientific knowledge and unearthing connective untold narratives in the world. She works across media and knowledge streams, with scientists, datasets, people, stories and land to storytell about molecular level connections between places and across time.
Based in The Hague, she has exhibited widely including most recently in MMGerdau Museum, Brazil and Maxxi, Rome. She has been awarded research residencies including most recently for S+T+ARTS The Hague, the Glenfiddich Contemporary Art Residency, Scotland, and HAWAPI, Peru.
Penelope Cain is currently undertaking art-science residency within the NaturArchy project at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy, considering the environmental, social and policy complexities around contested water, specifically competing brine groundwater demands between lithium mining and environmental health, currently playing out in the Atacama desert Chile; as world demand for lithium expands to enable transition to a carbon-neutral future.