Course summary

The MFA Drawing exists to invite students into a critical engagement with drawing, leading to enquiry with purpose. The MFA Drawing is designed to give students the opportunity to develop their drawing practice in a supportive, nurturing environment through a challenging and stimulating programme of modules. Each module will build and develop drawing and research enquires to provide a creative and intellectual framework for the exploration of current attitudes and phenomena in the context of contemporary drawing practice. Students will be encouraged to discover and connect with active drawing networks, practitioners, and research areas in both historical and contemporary contexts. Students are to understand that these are the networks that will continue to sustain their drawing practice beyond the MFA Drawing. Professional practice will be an essential part of the program with students developing communication skills, visual, written, and verbal, that are transferable into the cultural industries and beyond. Students will become active in the post graduate community and research community at DJCAD, a community of practice around drawing, and the wider context of the University of Dundee. DJCAD is already a centre of excellence for drawing; drawing a visible pulse across various areas: animation, comics, illustration, medical drawing, life drawing. Art colleges are unique incubators of creative thinking and problem-solving skills that can be adapted to both individual and societal challenges. The University of Dundee value the generation and sharing of knowledge and creativity in relation to personal, national, international, and global concerns. Developing resilience, ethical sensitivity, and a self-determined approach to how best to approach future practice that includes a student understanding how to showcase their abilities and thinking to others, is part of the MFA Drawing program. Drawing is an agile, eternal, contingent, and adaptive expanding practice and artform, well suited to enabling students to better navigate our collectively uncertain futures. The MFA Drawing aims to test conventional methodologies and emergent innovations alike, exploring a range of strategies, materials, and technologies with the aim of each student formulating a tested, meaningful methodology for their drawing. Process orientated, making drawings as a group, or individually, in response to drawing prompts, drawing from ‘the body’, drawing from ‘nature’, the students will be encouraged through making and critical reflection to challenge assumptions about the roles and definitions of drawing. Critical thinking and research will support the re-orientating the students practice to relevant and purposeful enquiry that reveals how the boundaries of a discipline or subject can shift the prism of drawing practice and research. Diversity of thinking and making will be extended through critical interrogation, debate, and peer learning, both in physical/studio/workshop communities, and via digital communities. The program aims to strengthen each individual’s self‐evaluation, reflective practice and cumulative progression. Assessment processes will be transparent catalysts to greater understanding of practice.