Fine Art

Course overview

The course will allow you the opportunity to focus on your given practice through core practice modules as well as interconnected critical theory and exhibition practice modules. The interplay of this provision will enable you to locate your practices at the forefront of contemporary fine art practice developing both critical and creative dialogues with staff and fellow students, and allowing you the opportunity to test out ideas within a professional environment and context.

MODULE GUIDE

Core modules

• Establishing Postgraduate Practice - An outline of intended study (Personal Development Plan) is the starting point for this core practice module, where you will be expected to initiate a practice-based research programme articulating your concerns within a critical and cultural context. This programme will be discussed and analysed as you progress by the staff team and specialist visitors. Various methodologies will be engaged on this module within a working context while engaging with the work including formal, contextual, philosophical and conceptual frameworks that are necessary in addressing the work. You will have the opportunity to present work on a one-to-one or group tutorial basis and develop a context for the work applicable to MFA level.
• Aesthetics and Critical Writing - This module delivers a critical framework that will feed into the core research module. It aims to develop both critical thinking and the skills to articulate that thinking, as well as the investigation of key thinkers of aesthetics that continue to inform discourses around contemporary practice: from Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche through to Adorno and Benjamin; from French phenomenology to American pragmatism and post-structuralism. The module will create an ongoing discursive connection - through group analysis and debate - between critical reflection, written practice and studio practice.
• Approaches to Exhibiting - Responsive to the changing nature of exhibition practices in all areas of activity, this module will critically examine certain approaches that inform our current understanding of objects, processes, contexts and receptions. It will examine these aspects historically, theoretically and practically by looking at thematic clusters, which will include issues of space, neutrality, social context and the politics of representation. Each of these themes will provide scope for the examination of texts, events and case studies leading to the development and implementation of your own small-scale curatorial projects.
• Extending Postgraduate Practice - This module follows on from the first year Core Research Practice in that you will further develop self-initiated practice-based research. It may well be inflected or informed by the choice of study route you have chosen, but will in all cases endeavour to deepen the chosen research within a professional context. You will be expected to be articulate and evaluate a contemporary context for your activities and display an innovative approach to all aspects of your chosen project. Specialist staff will provide a lively discursive arena for the potential expansion, progression and development of your work.
• Final Major Project - The Final Major Project represents the culmination of learning on the programme and provides an opportunity for you to develop and resolve a major area of fine art research. At the outset you will forward a research proposal to be approved by the module supervisor, which is informed by the practical and theoretical research carried out in the previous semester. Learning within the module is acquired through direct experimental autonomous studio research in which you test and develop the ideas outlined in your proposal.

Additional course information

Teaching takes place in seminars, individual tutorials andlecture-based sessions. There is a balance between various modes of discourse, interaction and instruction on the course, as well as between both the larger and smaller modules and the available study routes.

Assessment

MFA exhibition and critical commentary. Essays and seminar presentations.