Fine Art degree - MA

Program Overview

The MA Fine Art program at Bath Spa University fosters creativity in a cross-disciplinary environment, empowering students to develop their artistic skills and identity. Through experimentation, collaboration, and professional development, students refine their practice and prepare for a successful career in the art industry.

Program Outline

Working with students from across the Bath School of Art, Film and Media and School of Design, you’ll study a range of approaches including painting, sculpture, live art and photography, to further your skills and knowledge in your specialist area. Key to the Fine Art Master’s at Bath Spa is the chance to specialise in your chosen discipline while learning alongside fellow students across all MA Fine Art and MA Design pathways.

• Encourage you to build collaborative relationships with other artists and develop transferable skills.
• Take a holistic approach, embedding theory, research, and historical and contemporary practice into your work.

Outline:

Course Structure:

• The MA Fine Art program at Bath Spa runs over one year and is divided into three trimesters.

Trimester One:

• Begin to take chances and challenge your creative processes.
• Interrogate your existing knowledge and develop skills in an environment that encourages playfulness and artistic risk-taking.
• Experiment freely in a wide variety of specialist facilities, open studio spaces, and technical workshops – where expert support is on-hand.

Trimester Two:

• Building on the work in the first trimester, maintain an experimental approach, but start to narrow your focus.
• Evaluate your initial studio developments and refine your working strategy.
• Pay greater attention to the presentation of your practice and to test how finished works relate to each other in, as well as to the spaces of, exhibition sites.

Trimester Three:

• Work in the studio with increasing independence as you establish a professional practice.
• Devise and complete your Master’s Project, working to a proposal which contextualises your work within your specialist discipline and leads to your final Degree Show.

Course Modules:

• Research Methods
• Theory and Professional Context
• Practice 1 (Fine Art)
• Research Practice
• Theory and Professional Practices
• Practice 2 (Fine Art)
• Masters Project

Assessment:

• Your progress is evaluated throughout the course and at the end of each trimester through a mixture of exhibitions, verbal/visual presentations, research folders/blogs and written assignments.

Teaching:

• You’ll learn through lectures, talks, taught sessions, individual and group tutorials, and studio critiques and seminars.
• Visiting lecturers, and seminars with external professionals and internationally renowned designers and artists, will help you determine where your current practice sits within the industry.

Other:

• Fieldwork opportunities are offered throughout the academic year.
• Several awards and competitions at Bath Spa that MA Fine Art students can enter:
• The Porthleven Prize
• Peter Kinley Prize for Painting
• Betty and Peter McLean Prize (for ceramics)
• Freelands Painting Fellowship (open to postgraduate students who studied BA Fine Art at Bath School of Art, Flim and Media)
• Emerge studio residency
• Bath Spa is one of only three Adobe Creative Campuses in the UK, providing all students with access to the full Adobe Creative Suite.
• Specialist technical facilities across all of art and design
• Access to studio space where you can work on projects and refine your practice and your research.
• Locksbrook Campus is a Grade II listed building designed by Nicholas Grimshaw in 1976.
It has now been transformed into an innovative, open plan space, redesigned to meet 21st century environmental standards, with technical workshops surrounded by flexible studio spaces and large social areas.
• Locksbrook has received both a RIBA South West Award 2021 and RIBA National Award 2021, recognising and celebrating what an amazingly inspirational space it is to come together to design, make, do, create and learn in.