Fine Art BA Honours

The module aims to:

• Support students to refine a specialist approach that is underpinned by in depth awareness of research, contexts, processes or technologies relevant to their chosen area.
• Provide students with the opportunity to fully integrate conceptual, critical, formal, material, technical and theoretical interests and skills through practice and documentation.
• Shed light on the creative and critical potential of exploring relationships between practice, strategies of exhibition and display, and audience, ranging from individual studio-based practices through to the site-specific, collaborative or participatory, and from gallery-oriented to socially-engaged contexts.
• Apply and communicate an informed and research-led approach to practice, processes and contexts through documenting their learning, experimentation and progress.

This module aims to:

• Introduce students to the key specialist pathways that make up multi- disciplined fine art practice, including critical practice, social art practice, drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, multi-media practice, film and sound.
• Support students to establish an art practice through material, technical and conceptual exploration.
• Introduce students to the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and broader social, political and community contexts.
• Encourage the application of an imaginative and adventurous approach to specialist media materials, ideas, and process relevant to art practice.
• Foster the flexible and imaginative application of skills & knowledge to a variety of contexts, both individually & collaboratively.
• Introduce research as the basis for creative and critical practice.

This module aims to:

• Introduce students to the so-called art world as an open system of interdependent structures and agents, in which they are already participants
• Broaden students’ critical knowledge of how contemporary Fine Art is produced, distributed, mediated and curated.
• Support each student’s individual ability to begin constructing a critically reflexive sense of self as a developing artist.
• Empower students to claim a place in contemporary art ecologies.

This module aims to:

• Introduce the broad realm of today’s global visual cultures and their encounters with artistic practices.
• Critically explore intersectionality and interdisciplinarity through specific instances of how vision, knowledge and power intersect.
• Provide students with knowledge and skills to locate themselves between history and the present, critically negotiating their own place within the social and political realities that surround the making of art.
• Support students towards developing their own research and intellectual work as part of intentional communities of practice.
• Contextualise contemporary practice within historical contexts and visual culture’s regimes of representation, genres, and tropes.

The module aims to:

• Initiate the development of individual art practices where ideas are explored through a range of making processes.
• Help students establish a working momentum and develop as confident, reflective practitioners within the studio environment.
• Support students to critically engage with practice and grow their confidence to contribute to peer discussions of their emergent practices.
• Equip students with the ability to resolve the work they make in the studio, for public viewing, maintaining an exploratory and experimental approach.
• Encourage students to engage with and value a range of processes and record their work in progress, maintaining documentation that reflects their development.

This module aims to:

• Further develop students’ practice through the key specialist pathways that make up multi-disciplined fine art practice, including critical practice, social art practice, drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, multi-media practice, film and sound.
• Foster a deeper understanding of the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and the broader social, political and community contexts through their personal artistic development.
• Support students to apply further specialist skills & knowledge flexibly and imaginatively to a variety of contexts, both as an individual & collaboratively as a team.
• Build students’ confidence as researchers into, around, and for art practice.

This module builds on FNA1303’s introduction to art’s ecologies by putting a mostly theoretical engagement with different art organisations and different contexts of artistic labour to practice. We will learn from past (Artists’ Placement Agency) and evolving (Arte Util) examples of social art practice, in order to support each student to take an inventory of the unique toolkit that being an artist brings to the world of work. Students are supported in researching, holding, and reflecting on a short placement that could be either at an art’s organisation or another organisation that would stand to benefit from input from an artist.

• Develop students’ understanding of the histories and debates that define contemporary art worlds in their local/global dimensions.
• explore the field of Contemporary Fine Art practice, its core concepts, histories and institutional realities by looking closely at the production, reception, and intention, as well as economic, social, and ideological aspects
• delve into the critical understandings of race, class, sex, gender and sexuality introduced in FNA1930 into greater depth, conceived here as factors within the global developments of ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ art.
• In dialogue with FNA2203, examine recent artistic investigations of medium (and the ‘post-medium’ condition), exploring the diverse forms that contemporary art practice takes.
• Investigate art’s globalisation and the ongoing development of digital and analogue media for representation and the circulation of images.
• Support students to further develop and expand their research skills and methods, in preparation for FNA3903.

The module aims to:

• Enable students to consolidate and reflect on their practice while developing the transferable skill of independent learning.
• Guide students in constructing a learning process distinctive to their own practice by drawing on a range of research methods and a range of conceptualisation and making strategies.
• Encourage students to extend their engagement with contemporary art practice through encounters with a range of practices, discourses and contexts
• Support students in becoming discerning, ethically oriented, and critically engaged practitioners, able to engage in contemporary debates surrounding art and cultures, making links across modules and disciplines
• Encourage students to engage with and value process, supporting materials documentation and reflection in developing a body of work
• Support students in developing and co-curating a substantial and coherent exhibition of work for assessment.

This module represents the culmination of your exploration with art’s complex ecologies and aims to prepare students for entering the arts industries as a graduate of BA Fine Art and qualified, professional, art workers. It aims to:

• Furnish students with the knowledge and skills to launch their career, from advice on funding to forging a creative CV and the right web presence.
• Help students clarify the role that they want their practice and labour to play in art’s ecologies and in wider society, locally and globally.
• Empower students to manage how their work could and should be seen, interpreted and understood by different audiences.
• Examine questions of curating, displaying and disseminating students’ own practice and other contemporary art practices.
• Explore how audiences engage with contemporary art practices, through analysis of field trips, exhibition visits, presentations and texts.
• Guide students to produce appropriate documentation of their practice for both personal/developmental and professional/promotional uses.

This module aims to enable students to identify and deliver a formal extended thesis, presented according to academic conventions. This will be the product of sustained and creative engagement with a range of research resources, on and offline, and it offers the chance to develop an in-depth understanding of an area of visual culture or contemporary art of relevance either to the student’s own studio-practice or their broader cultural and artistic interests. Students will be encouraged to use writing in a creative and purposive way, and to explore the broad possibilities of the form of the essay.

You will be studying at our north London campus in Hendon.

Whether you are studying full or part-time – your course timetable will balance your study commitments on campus with time for work, life commitments and independent study.

We aim to make timetables available to students at least 2 weeks before the start of term. Some weeks are different due to how we schedule classes and arrange on-campus sessions.

Typical weekly breakdown

As a a full-time student, your weekly timetable will typically consist of four 2.5-hour taught sessions, which will consist of lectures, seminars and group tutorials, individual tutorials, and workshop inductions, demonstrations, and guided activities. Please note that some individual tutorials and workshops may be scheduled in different slots, depending on availability.

During your first year, your weekly timetable will look something like this:

Outside of teaching hours, you’ll learn independently through self-directed practice and study, which will involve developing your art practice, visiting exhibitions, reading articles and books, working on projects, undertaking research, and preparing for assessments including exhibitions, coursework, and presentations.

Your independent learning is supported by the library and study hub, laptop hire, and with online materials in MyUniHub.

Here is an indication of how you will split your time.

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Our excellent teaching and support teams will help you develop the skills relevant to your degree from research and practical skills to critical thinking. Our Sheppard Library is open 24 hours a day during term time. And we offer free 24-hour laptop loans with full desktop software, free printing and Wi-Fi to use on or off campus, even over the weekend.

There are no exams but your coursework sketchbooks, presentations, and written work will be assessed.

We'll test your understanding and progress with informal and formal tests.

The informal tests usually take place at least once per module, from which you’ll receive feedback from your tutor. The grades from these tests don’t count towards your final marks.

There are formal assessments for each module, usually at the end, which will count towards your module and your final marks. You will also develop your critical skills, reflect on your work and set goals through peer and self-evaluation.

Assessments are reviewed annually and may be updated based on student feedback or feedback from an external examiner.

To help you achieve the best results, we will provide regular feedback.