Fine Art: Contemporary Practice MA

Why study MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice at University College Falmouth?

MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice enables you to engage in a substantial period of study to help you review, change, develop and strengthen your position as an artist. The course is designed to encourage artistic responsibility, self-direction, and competence. It enables you to develop an individual expertise, and to foster the professional excellence necessary to operate successfully as an artist.

To view the work of graduating students from the 2010 MA show visit: www.mafa10.org.uk

Tell me more about the MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice course

 MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice award information form (242.52 KB)

The course is designed to support a sustained period of enquiry that enables you to attain a high level of artistic practice and professional competence. It fosters the belief that fine art practices are a rich and potent source for imagining and developing unique ways of conceiving, thinking, and acting in the world today. As such, the importance of practice is emphasised as an essential method of instigating, investigating and making sense of ideas and concepts.

To compliment the idea of learning through making, your artwork, and its associated ideas and concepts, will be subjected to artistic and critical scrutiny. This provides a means of gaining a critically informed understanding of your own individual practice and its position within the field of contemporary art.

The course focuses on ideas and concerns of contemporary art to provide a common ground for students. It actively celebrates the diversity of contemporary practice. Inspiration for recent projects have been drawn from areas including archives, narratives, philosophies, personal histories, sciences, literatures, geographies, religions, space, gender, childhood memory, time, technologies, body, weather cycles, gardening, perception and ritual.

In terms of your own individual practice, you will be encouraged to initiate and develop artworks in any media that you believe to be appropriate for expressing and representing your ideas. Students on the course have produced work using a range of media including drawing, textiles, fibre arts, painting, printmaking, textual practices, sculpture, performance, installation, video, sound, photography and digital media.

Visiting speakers this year have included:

Rona Lee
Neville Gaby
WHW (What, How & for Whom)
Simon Morrissey
Tabatha Andrews
Sara Black
Claire Doherty
Paul O'Neill
David Prior
Abigail Reynolds

Entry requirements and how to apply

Entry requirements through the university sector include Honours Degrees, Foundation Degrees and HNDs in a related subject. If you have solid professional industry experience rather than academic achievement, this may be acceptable for entry to study at this level through a process called APEL (Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning). More information about entry requirements can be found here

Applications should be made direct to Falmouth using the online application form

For further information about MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice at University College Falmouth, please email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 255763.

Interview and selection process

Along with your application you will need to send us either some samples of work or a link to your website or blog, if you have one. These can either be sent with your application or separately, by email to admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or by post to:

Admissions, University College Falmouth
Woodlane, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 4RH

Once you have applied the course team will assess your application and if we think you have the potential to study at Falmouth we will invite you to an interview. We would really like to see you in person but we can hold a telephone/Skype interview if this is not possible. 

Answers and advice about the course

 Postgraduate study guide 2012 (2.70 MB)

If you have any queries about the course please email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 255763. 

Funding your study

A Master’s degree represents a significant investment in your future, and you will rightly be concerned about funding. Our student fees & funding section outlines fees for full and part time students and has guides to introduce you to ways of funding your course at Falmouth.

Postgraduate Placements Cornwall

Put your skills to use in Cornwall's dynamic business environment on a paid placement project

Postgraduate Placements Cornwall is a consultancy level business placement programme starting in September 2011 and running in Cornwall until 2014. The programme is delivered by University College Falmouth and partner institutions University of Exeter and PCMD.

For more information about the project, please contact the Placement Office in the Annexe at Tremough:

Tel: 01326 254200 or 01326 255984
Email: placementteam@falmouth.ac.uk

Sandra Blow Scholarship

This new scholarship for MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice students was bestowed on the College from the legacy of Sandra Blow, the English painter, who lived in St Ives from 1994 until her death in 2006. The end of an MA course is a crucial juncture in the career of a new artist, and the purpose of the scholarship is to assist graduating students in the first few months of their career. For example, the winner may choose to use the money to pay for studio space. Students will be selected for the scholarship before the end of their course, by a panel including the Course Leader and the Director of Art and Performance. The scholarship is worth £5,000 each year, to be shared between two or three students.

More information about funding for Postgraduate study is available here

Career opportunities

Graduates of this postgraduate course in fine art engage in individual and collaborative arts practice, community, architectural and environmental arts projects, curatorial activities, art education or further study.

Related courses

• Art & Environment MA
• Curatorial Practice MA
• Illustration: Authorial Practice MA