MA Fine Art

MA Fine Art represents an exciting opportunity for students to challenge and build on their previous achievements and to study at an advanced level. Students deepen their knowledge and their ability to focus on their chosen field in relation to the key aspects that inform it.

Set within a community and culture of makers, students engage in dialogue and debate with their peers, both within and across MA pathways.

This experience provides dynamic and interactive sessions, which are vital to the enhancement and testing of new thinking and ideas generation as well as offering the broadest available critical arena for discussion of student work.

The course is delivered through three equally weighted units of study. The first unit ‘Strategies for Practice’ encourages a re-visiting of a fundamental understanding of materials, methods and contexts of fine art regardless of a students’ level of experience. Although, some strategies may be familiar, you will be encouraged to analyse and critically evaluate how and why they are manifested in your practice. If your first degree was in a subject other than fine art and may therefore feel less familiar with given working or reflective processes, this unit will give you the opportunity to explore and develop skills and adjust to new and curious ways of working. If you are an experienced practitioner this unit will challenge you to articulate and question some of the basic assumptions that may underpin your practice; for instance, why are certain things important? We consider this a vital levelling experience for all students.

As the ‘Strategies for Practice’ unit progresses you will be encouraged to survey promising areas of investigation in preparation for Navigation and Transformation and Audience and Resolution. You will identify theories relevant to your emerging study focus and methods appropriate to these concerns for generating new knowledge and understanding in the Body of Work and the Contextual Journal. There is no expectation at this stage for these ideas or work to be resolved.

‘Navigation and Transformation’ will help to determine and refine your practice culminating in the presentation of a final coherent body of work in ‘Audience and Resolution’. By contrast, these two units are predominantly self-directed and sustain and fuse the understanding and application of research methods, completion of plans and presentations to students and staff. ‘Navigation and Transformation’ will require you to formalise your intentions in a Study Plan, which will act as a template for ‘Audience and Resolution’ as well as future applications for professional opportunities, setting out the parameters for an ambitious period of self-directed practice, and to interrogate contextual issues relevant to your study focus through your practice.

In ‘Audience and Resolution’, you will carry through your plan of action identified in the Study Plan and establish ways of editing, presenting and disseminating the outcomes of your project in ways that communicate to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. In this final Unit you will have the opportunity to attend a PhD taster day, where staff will share their first-hand experiences of PhD study as well as presentations on application procedures, funding, doctoral types, academic writing and proposal writing. If you are interested in discussing an application of your own and developing a proposal, additional support is given.

Part-time pathway

The part-time pathway is carried out over a period of 90 weeks – rather than 45 weeks as in the full-time pathway.

The first unit, Strategies of Practice seeks to identify and critically review the attitudes and understanding underlying your Fine Art practice. It does this by encouraging you to return, through practice, to an engagement with fundamental components of your Fine Art activity, exploring the contextual issues that motivate and shape your practice, including audiences, sites of display, technological advances. You’ll be encouraged to reflect ‘in-action’ as you question the nature of visual communication. You’ll be encouraged to scope out new areas for deeper enquiry.

Innovation, collaboration and communication are key skills taught by professionals and academics in the units Navigation and Transformation and Audience and Resolution. These units promote the processes necessary for students to engage in new technological advances, develop critical and theoretical frameworks, and raise their level of business awareness and self-direction along with an understanding of the trans-disciplinary nature of contemporary creative practice.

In Audience and Resolution, you will work towards and produce your final outcomes/conclusions following the rationale established in your Study Plan. In this phase of study, you will apply the research methods identified in Navigation and Transformation and determine how to present and disseminate the outcomes of the project.

If you’re interested in applying for MA Fine Art Course, you should be able to demonstrate your passion and ambition for your practice within your discipline area. We’d recommend that you make note of the Course Overview which puts centre stage the dialogue created between international and UK students when writing your statement. We’re very interested to hear what you will add to the community and culture of the MA Fine Art course.