Course summary

The foundation pathway provides students with non-standard entry points to progress onto the BA (Hons) Fine Art programme. The foundation year allows you to develop skills across a range of media and introduces creative best practice in preparation for the first year of the undergraduate programme. During the foundation year you will have the opportunity to explore creative processes relevant to visual design, animation, illustration, print-making, fine art, and photography. The course is designed to encourage visual exploration and creative discovery within an engaging and vibrant studio setting. Upon successful completion of the foundation course, you will join the undergraduate BA (Hons) Fine Art programme equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to successfully complete an undergraduate degree.

• Facilities. You will have inductions in and access to a wide range of specialist workshop facilities to advance your artistic enquiry, including letterpress and printmaking, ceramics, woodworking, metal, video, photography, audio, immersive and augmented technologies, and digital fabrication processes like 3D printing.

• Studio culture. Our main teaching and learning space is the studio and we place emphasis on creating a friendly, supportive, vibrant, creative, critical and reflective studio environment. You will work in dedicated studio spaces and specialist workshops through a mix of practical exercises, one-to-one and group tutorials, critiques, seminars and interactive lectures, artist talks, fieldwork, and field trip opportunities.

• Thinking through doing. This is a practice-based programme, which means that critical enquiry is at the heart of making work. We encourage you to be exploratory and experimental, to think through making and to embrace uncertainty and not knowing. You will be making and showing work in the studio and out in the city through relationships with Plymouth's exciting artist communities.

• Interdisciplinary. The University of Plymouth is a broad-based university, internationally recognised for its research into marine science, climate change, biomedical and health sciences and across the arts and humanities. Studio practice modules and the common challenges and dissertation modules offer you opportunities to work collaboratively with researchers and practitioners across the University and out into the city and region.

• Collaboration. You will collaborate with partners through placements in organisations like KARST, The Box, the Arts Institute, the Marine Institute and the Sustainable Earth Institute, and you will exhibit work both on- and off-site throughout your degree.

• Degree show. Showcase your final project in a faculty-wide exhibition alongside students from our 12 art and design degrees. The Degree Show is your chance to introduce friends and family, your new creative network and art community, prospective employers and the general public to your work.