Fine Art (with Advanced Practice) MA

Teesside University

In this studio-based module, you investigate a variety of approaches to interrogate your own practice and artistic methods as a development to postgraduate study. You design your own trajectory and develop agency through a co-created curriculum and reflective approaches. You are encouraged to be research active and experiment with a range of forms and approaches within contemporary art and consider methods across disciplines. The module works towards developing styles and approaches articulated at postgraduate level aligning your aims within your own practices. You consider appropriate theory and themes in contemporary art practice and how it might inform the work you wish to develop. This is supported by a series of lectures that introduce you to current themes in contemporary art practice. Development is supported through a community of artists, and the module offers opportunities to regularly show your work for peer review through group critique, feedback from tutors, and discussion with visiting artists and curators to the gallery and school. You develop your own strategies and an individual plan relevant to your own practice through stages of experimentation.

You extend and enhance your studio practice towards building and communicating your own artistic vision. Your focus of study acts as a practical overview of the design of self-authored projects in consultation with your negotiated study plan and the co-created nature of the course. Through this, you are encouraged to identify and advance the salient points of your practice, engage and lead in peer-to-peer reflection and support networks, as well as developing intentionality.

The culmination of the MA Fine Art is the production of a final exhibition, which includes the production of a body of work to a high quality, a clear curatorial intent and a refined and skilled research ability demonstrated through practice-led methods. You become future ready by forming an overarching exhibition/event that evidences their development through the culmination of a highly professional and ambitious public display. You are expected to take agency and reflect on practices you have been working on up to this point to present your artistic aspirations and co-produce the curatorial framework for the show. This body of work is supported by a written reflection that demonstrates your own cultural agency and awareness of globally significant practices. The reflection also demonstrates the processes and decisions you have made through the final stages and how you are actioning your art practice.

This module allows for a more in-depth investigation into how artists create their work. Following on a fully developed studio culture on the course, this module questions what alternatives exist to create work in a post-internet age that might engage more fully with social justice, art/life practices, spatial and virtual design and experimentation? How can the notion of both traditional and contemporary practice itself be challenged, and how might your evolving practice be informed or lead the way? You might re-appropriate practices not traditionally viewed within fine art to interrogate the boundaries between and across disciplines.

You explore and examine methodologies in research to determine the relationship and balance between textual and artistic production. You focus on the production and/or discovery of knowledge and the relationship between textual practices, theory, and art-making. This approach works closely with the model of artist writings in particular to understand the connection between intention and an expanded understanding of the contemporary world. This approach investigates and reconfigures the role art-making as a development, rather than merely an output of research.