Fine Art

This professional experience module delivers preparation for a future career in the creative industries in a number of ways. The teaching, learning and assessment strategy is designed to build upon previous professional experience and expertise by providing opportunities in bridging the gap between practice and academia, or working in the creative industries through a placement, or exploring and implementing different modes of collaborative, social or participatory practices within a project, or increasing exhibition management and curatorial skills. Essentially, the module provides a platform of experiences that will support your understanding of development as an arts academic, creative industries employee or independent professional artist.

In this module you pursue rigorous and sustained research, exploring and investigating your own concerns out of which resolved outcomes emerge. The module provides a supportive context within which you initiate and establish a self-directed project. This process will enable you to re-evaluate, extend and challenge the strategies, techniques and motivations that underpin your existing practice, professional experience and prior learning. The emphasis is placed upon the generation of independent/collaborative/participatory practice-based work with materials, processes and contexts as well as engagement with theoretical ideas and concerns. This module gives you an opportunity to evolve a confident and intellectually stimulating working process as an artist and demands intensive, creative engagement coupled with sustained reflection. You will work with a nominated supervisor. Developed work in progress will be shown publicly at the end of this module.

This module develops your theoretical understanding of fine art and encourages you to critically engage with key topics from modern and contemporary art and culture. It provides you with opportunities to develop knowledge and understanding of fine art, as well as an ability to analyse the range of critical discourses that frame and inform contemporary practice. In this module, you will attend seminars, with sessions dedicated to the introduction of selected topics in modern and contemporary art and culture. Emphasis will be placed on your close reading and analysis of texts and will examine a range of critical forms of engagement, and critical positions taken on these. You will work independently and in groups, contributing to discussion and making presentations where required.

In this module, research and carry out independent critical investigation of a topic of your choice. This topic may relate directly or indirectly to your own practice. The module provides the opportunity to develop a sustained and critical theoretical position on any aspect of modern and contemporary art or visual culture, which may act to inform your subsequent practice-based work. The module spans the process of proposing an appropriate topic, researching it, developing and defending a position or argument in relation to the chosen subject and producing a critical essay. It is focused on your own learning throughout and is taught through seminars and individual tutorials.

This module represents the culmination of your learning throughout the course. You will work with a nominated supervisor to produce a work or body of work that is presented during the Fine Art Postgraduate Exhibition (MFA Show). The module extends the independent process of your development begun earlier in the programme and provides the opportunity to further develop and realise intellectually challenging and imaginative work through fine art practice to an advanced academic and professional standard. The module represents the culmination of your contemporary fine art practice at taught postgraduate level and provides a platform from which further career pathways can develop.