Course summary

Please check the Sheffield Hallam University website for the latest information. Course Summary MA Fine Art offers a dynamic immersion in art practice through a course designed to reflect the experience of an artist’s residency. Tailored teaching supports your creative thinking to evolve your studio work and your professional ambitions.    You will cultivate your work and ideas with a focus on building your individual career as an artist in a professional studio environment alongside a diverse and dynamic group of peers. The innovatory contemporary curriculum is structured to inspire experimentation and open up expanded forms of fine art. How You Learn You will actively explore their artistic research methods beyond the studio through presentations, exhibitions and textual outputs that include writing artist’s statements, reviewing their practice throughout the module through presentations, and an exhibition that surveys their practice upon completion of the module. Applied learning The course will engage students with the diversity of thought and practice that characterise the fine art world, and also debate the place of art within the globalised world.  The course is conceived as an artist’s residency to support you to develop an individual artistic identity. Central to the course is the ongoing development of a studio ethos and the opportunity to reconfigure, unravel and rebuild the concerns and research that underpin a practice in relation to material experimentation. Students and staff work together to develop a generative atmosphere which accommodates a plurality of voices, critical opinions and material expressions which both critique and are in dialogue with the expanded contexts of art and their contemporary manifestations. You are taught by experienced artist/academics with a background in internationally recognised research. Assessment at all levels is through presentations of bodies of artwork, statements of practice, exhibitions and other forms of public dissemination. You will be based in studios integrated within a professional artists studio group. This gives you valuable direct experience to prepare you for your future career, engaging you directly with professional networks and a hands-on understanding of the skills required to sustain a career. Self-directed study underpins a curriculum designed to support independent research emerging from the making of art works. Students pursue their creative ideas through a variety of approaches, supported by both academic and technical staff with a high level of expertise and experience. Students work with sculpture, painting, photography, film, video, performance, text, sound, installation, drawing, printmaking and all manner of object and image making, or combinations of these. There is no limit or expectation as to the media or form you use. The course has embedded links with professional arts organisations. You will have opportunities to work with artist's studio groups, Museums Sheffield and the galleries and visual art networks in the city. Seminars, guest lecturers will deeply engage students with artistic, critical, curatorial and public opportunities to gain an understanding of the field of ideas and practices that govern the art world in order to support their participation in it. In the context of a shifting contemporary art world, you will engage with changing ideas of what it is to be an artist, maker, curator, art writer, as well consideration of the art market itself through an examination and critique of the forces that shape artmaking, art writing and artistic engagement with publics and public spaces. We aim for a globalised curriculum broadening the understanding of art today by having culturally diverse students as ‘artists-in-residence’ participating in the course and producing art and interacting and sharing their processes and contextual approach.