Fine Art Practices (Top-Up)

BA (Hons) Fine Art Practices (Top-Up)

Mode: full-time

At the heart of the programme is an enduring passion for the development of your individual personal vision as a fine artist. At every point, you are encouraged to exercise and strengthen your own voice as an artist, whilst developing an impressive portfolio of specialist and transferable skills and experiences.

The Fine Art Practises degree offers a blend of traditional and innovative fine art media. Drawing, painting, 3D, installation, time-based, virtual and lens-based media form the core topics available. Additionally, the College provides an expanded menu to support a customised profile for fine art students. These include sonic art, glass processes, ceramics, curating, performance, virtual software, metals, from the very large scale architectural to the intricate techniques of jewellery making applied as a sculptural medium. The cross-college programme of visiting lecturers includes a diverse range of practitioners strengthening the cross-disciplinary opportunities through critical debate as well as through practice.

During the BA Honours Degree in Fine Art Practices you will be encouraged to identify and direct your own career pathway as a fine artist, and to gain appropriate work-related experience accordingly, whether it be in promoting and exhibiting your own work, or working to specific commissions; project management; group exhibition organisation and curating skills; sound and image editing in the media-related industries; event arts; teaching; web design; or working as part of in inter-disciplinary creative team.

During the BA (Hons) top-up year you will have a unique opportunity to develop and expand your skills through experimentation. This is a very special ‘year 3’ experience, as the focus is on mature experimentation, self-knowledge and the sense that creative growth and change is an ongoing component of successful creativity. This allows you to further develop your customised portfolio of skills including the expanded range of specialist processes. Alongside studio practice, you will explore contemporary cultural issues and debates from a variety of perspectives, having the opportunity to be involved in interdisciplinary seminars with specialists from fine art, applied arts, fashion, spatial design. This broadened awareness strengthens your understanding of your own discipline and its relation to other areas of creative activity.

The Fine Artists of the future will need to be vibrant creative practitioners in a rapidly evolving creative culture. To be equipped for this, you must have a solid base of well-honed skills combined with flexibility and versatility. These are the fundamental themes of studying Fine Art Practices at Plymouth College of Art.

Career possibilities, artist – artist in residence, commissions, publicly funded arts projects, curation and exhibition industries, education (including formal teaching situations, gallery and outreach education, community workshops), creative events industries, web and interactive design (including virtual gallery design, e-commerce, interactive technologies), arts management, marketing and promotion, media and sound industries, science and art collaborations, creative consultancy, academic research.