Fine Art BA Honours

This module introduces you to contemporary global visual cultures and artistic practices. You will critically explore intersectionality and interdisciplinarity through specific instances of how vision, knowledge and power intersect. It will provide you with the knowledge and skills to locate yourself between history and the present, as you begin to negotiate your own place within the social and political realities that surround the making of art. It will support you towards developing your own research and intellectual work as part of intentional communities of practice. You will contextualise contemporary practice within historical contexts and visual culture’s regimes of representation, genres, and tropes.

This module introduces you to the art world as an open system of interdependent structures and agents, in which you are already participants. It will:

• Support your ability to construct a critically reflexive sense of self as a developing artist.
• Help you create habits of self-documentation and self-reflection which are fundamental to both fine art studentship and a career in the arts.
• Introduce you to a diverse range of contemporary art practices, production, distribution, mediation and curation.
• Guide you to take an inventory of the unique toolkit that being an artist brings to the world of work.
• Prepare you for a short placement in an external organisation or context that would benefit from input from an artist and/or offer insight into future professional possibilities.  

This module will initiate the development of individual art practices where ideas are explored through a range of making processes. It will help you establish a working momentum and develop as confident, reflective practitioners within the studio environment. It will support you to critically engage with practice and grow your confidence to contribute to peer discussions of your emergent practices. It will equip you with the ability to develop the work they make in the studio for public viewing, maintaining an exploratory and experimental approach. It will encourage you to engage with and value a range of processes and record your work in progress, maintaining documentation that reflects your development. 

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 will engage you with art’s ecologies and focuses on placement preparation.

It will support you to:

• Practice your theoretical engagement with different art organisations, institutions, support agencies, structures, and contexts of artistic labour
• Develop your understanding of social art practice and increase your employability
• Undertake and reflect on a short placement in an external organisation that would benefit from input from an artist and/or offer insight into future professional possibilities
• Undertake practice-based learning to develop your understanding of employer engagement and the unique toolkit that being an artist brings to the world of work.

The module will help you consolidate and reflect on your practice while developing the transferable skill of independent learning. It will guide you in constructing a learning process distinctive to your own practice by drawing on a range of research methods and conceptualisation and making strategies. It will encourage you to extend your engagement with contemporary art practice through encounters with a range of practices, discourses, and contexts. This module will support you on the road to becoming discerning, ethically oriented, and critically engaged practitioners, able to engage in contemporary debates surrounding art and cultures and to draw links across modules and disciplines. It will encourage you to engage with and value process, documentation, collection of supporting materials, and reflection in developing a body of work. It will support you in developing and co-curating a substantial and coherent exhibition of work for assessment. 

This module will further develop your practice through the key specialisms that make up multi-disciplined fine art practice, including critical practice, printmaking, 3D printing digital image capture & edit, virtual and augmented reality, motion capture, film and sound. It will foster a deeper understanding of the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and the broader social, political and community contexts through students’ personal artistic development. This module will support you to apply further specialist skills & knowledge flexibly and imaginatively to a variety of contexts, both as an individual & collaboratively as a team. It will build your confidence as researchers into, around, and for art practice. 

This module will develop your understanding of the histories and debates that define contemporary art worlds in their local/global dimensions. It will help you explore the field of contemporary art practice, its core concepts, histories and institutional realities, by looking closely at its production, reception, and intention, as well as economic, social, and ideological aspects. This module will delve into the critical understandings of race, class, gender and sexuality introduced in earlier modules in greater depth in dialogue with practice teaching and learning, examine current artistic investigations of medium (and the ‘post-medium’ condition), exploring the diverse forms that contemporary art practice takes. It will investigate art’s globalisation and the ongoing development of digital and analogue media for representation and the circulation of images. It will support you to further develop and expand their research skills and methods, in preparation for the final year Self-Directed Research and Thesis module. 

This module will support you to refine a specialist approach that is underpinned by in-depth awareness of research, contexts, processes or technologies relevant to their chosen area. It will provide you with the opportunity to fully integrate conceptual, critical, formal, material, technical and theoretical interests and skills through practice and documentation. This module will 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. It will help you apply and communicate an informed and research-led approach to practice, processes and contexts through documenting their learning, experimentation and progress.

This module will consolidate your capacity for self-directed practice evidenced through the production of an ambitious body of work. It will support you in refining a specialist approach that is underpinned by in-depth awareness of research methodologies, contexts, processes or technologies relevant to your chosen area. It will give you the opportunity to fully integrate conceptual, critical, formal, material, technical and theoretical interests and skills through practice and documentation. This module will 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. You will be able apply and communicate an informed and research-led approach to practice, processes and contexts through documenting learning, experimentation and progress. 

This module will enable you to identify and deliver a formal extended thesis, presented according to academic conventions. It will support you through a sustained and creative engagement with a range of research resources, on and offline. This module will offer you the opportunity to develop an in-depth understanding of an area of visual culture or contemporary art of relevance either to your own practice or your broader cultural and artistic interests. It will support you exploring the broad possibilities of writing, encouraging them to approach it as a practice. This module will consolidate your skills of project identification, research organisation and development, time management, textual and visual analysis and the presentation of a critical argument. 

This module represents the culmination of your exploration of art’s complex ecologies and prepares you for entering the arts industries as a graduate of Fine Art BA and qualified, professional, art workers. It will furnish you with the knowledge and skills to launch your career, from advice on funding to forging a creative CV and the right web presence. It will help you clarify the role that you want your practice and labour to play in art’s ecologies and in wider society, locally and globally. This module will guide you to examine questions of curating, displaying and disseminating your own practice and other contemporary art practices. It will provide you with opportunities to explore how audiences engage with contemporary art practices, through analysis of field trips, exhibition visits, presentations and texts. This module will guide you in producing appropriate documentation of your practice for both personal/developmental and professional/promotional uses. 

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

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:

Note: this is only an example and subject to change.

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

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.

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.

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