The aim of the course is to direct the student towards independent study by encouraging a studio practice based on debate, collaboration, enquiry and risk taking. The programme is structured to generate a synthesis between practice and theory. Through the shared experience of generating, discussing and testing ideas, students establish an understanding of the creative process and theoretical issues that inform it. This understanding is facilitated by lectures, visiting artists, tutorials and group seminars.
With the help of Internationally trained teaching staff and practising artists whose expertise covers painting, drawing, sculpture, video, photography and printmaking students will be encouraged to explore their contemporary context, respond to shifts in culture and reflect on their own positions as creative forces. There is a lively and diverse lecture programme where visual artists, poets, art critics and curators explain their practice to the whole student group, encouraging debate and exciting discussion.
On successful completion of the programme, students will typically have:
Knowledge and Understanding:
- How ideas, concerns and values are expressed and embodied through making.
- The ways in which cultural, historical and theoretical issues support and inform a broad range of recent and contemporary fine art.
- The ways in which contextual, historical, cultural and theoretical issues can be used as creative resources to develop and gain insight into students’ own practices.
- Where to contextually locate the student’s own practice alongside contemporary practitioners.
- Professional practice and visual arts career opportunities and how to effectively respond to them.
Intellectual Skills:
- Critically explore how art communicates through its associated languages by engaging fully with art practice.
- Recognise and reflect on cultural, intellectual and emotional relationship to content as embodied in practical work.
- Demonstrate critical reflection, including identifying appropriate questions for enquiry, formulating independent judgements, articulating reasoned arguments and responding to the critical views of others.
- Demonstrate the development of a thoughtful and questioning approach to practice and take on board the critical responses of others.
Practical Skills:
- Express and embody ideas, concerns and values through making.
- Fully explore the potential of communicating in imaginative and personally ambitious ways and explore new contexts, sites and methods for practice.
- Demonstrate relevant skills in selecting, exhibiting and installing studio practice with understanding of relation to audience/s.
- Demonstrate appropriate and competent use of media within studio practice and realise ideas through to a resolved outcome.
Transferable Skills:
- Communicate ideas and information effectively in written and spoken English and visual forms, with due consideration for audiences, language use and academic referencing conventions.
- Work independently by setting goals, managing own learning, coordinating workloads, project planning and meeting deadlines in response to set briefs and self-initiated study.
- Demonstrate good studentship through engagement, collaboration and participation.
- Manage, research using a variety of resources to gather material, evaluate sources and experiences, document findings and develop an independent line of critical reasoning supported by evidence.
