Course units
Unit 1: Establishing a community
This unit is an introduction to your course, the College and the University. You’ll develop your own practice and ideas while continually making work in a professional context for a public audience. You’ll work collaboratively on exhibitions and events with other students and partner organisations.
Off-site activities will include field trips and introductions to London’s emerging art scene. Additionally, you’ll explore ideas, contexts and critical dialogues that surround and inform contemporary art practice. As part of the unit, You'll produce a Research Portfolio that documents your artwork and critically locates this artwork within contemporary cultural contexts.
Unit 2: Making your work public
This unit is designed to help you refine your ideas and how to articulate them to different audiences. Discussion forums will help you position your ideas within contemporary dialogues and debates. Consultancies with visiting guests will give you a chance to get professional feedback on your practice and development.
A series of professional development workshops will help you with communication of your work, exhibition strategies and project management. You’ll take part in and organise projects with other students and external partners and present work in a variety of exhibition and event formats.
Continuing from Unit 1, you will produce a further refined Research Portfolio that documents your artwork and critically locates this artwork within contemporary cultural contexts. You’ll also submit a proposal that outlines how you plan to progress your professional practice during the unit 3.
Unit 3: Locating and sustaining your practice
Unit 3 is about progressing your career ambitions and will take place largely off-campus. You’ll be assigned and supported by an advisor, who is an arts professional. You’ll research how you might activate your practice within an external context that you have chosen and identified as appropriate to your development.
The course takes a very inclusive and dynamic approach to both where and how you structure your Unit 3 project. You are encouraged to think beyond your studio practice and engage in collective and public facing contexts that support the critical and professional development of your practice. For example, previous students have set up studio collectives, started galleries, joined artist residencies, curated exhibitions, published books, and found employment within a professional arts context in the United Kingdom or abroad.
You’ll be asked to reflect on and document your learning and development as well as the outcomes of your Unit 3 project in a Research Portfolio.
Note: 120 Credits must be passed before the final unit is undertaken.
