Beyond the studio: Falmouth lecturers on studying MA Fine Art Online
24 July 2026
Here at Falmouth, we believe that studying for an Online Fine Art MA opens up a world of creative opportunities.
Away from the traditional studio, our postgraduate students engage with communities across the globe, produce work that reflects a vast array of cultures and worldviews, and learn innovative ways of exhibiting their art to new audiences.
In this interview, course leader Josie Cockram and lecturers Kate Fahey and Srin Surti discuss the benefits and challenges of teaching online, the incredible work produced by their students, and the worldwide community of Falmouth Fine Art students and alumni that facilitates artistic collaboration across borders.
Tell us a bit about yourselves
JC: I’m the Course Lead on MA Fine Art Online and I run the first module, ‘Contemporary Positions and Practice’. I’ve been involved with the programme since it launched in 2021. I trained in sculpture and I work with moving image, sound and embodied and gendered experiences of space – online and on the ground. Developing this course has made me rethink the relationship between my studio practice and teaching.
SS: I’m an Online Tutor on the ‘Collaborative Practice’ module, and I’ve also taught on others including ‘Informing Contexts’ and ‘Contemporary Positions and Practice’. Coming from a print background, I’m always thinking about how we make imprints on each other. In my current PhD, I’m thinking about how ambivalence around relief as printed image can be used as an analogy for themes of cultural hybridity, as well as exploring that through a South Asian diasporic perspective.
KF: I’m a Lecturer and I lead the ‘Final Major Project’ module. I also come from a print background, but I’m an artist and researcher working across sculpture, sound and installation. Broadly, my interests are in making through feminist methodologies and ideas in relation to storytelling, materiality, affects and haptics. I’m interested in non-hierarchical spaces, co-creation and peer learning; thinking about pedagogical approaches where students are encouraged to be active agents in their own learning experience.
How would you describe MA Fine Art Online at Falmouth?
JC: We talk a lot as a team about what a de-centred form of art education might look like. We have an international intake with students working on every continent, which means we’re supporting artists in very different contexts, bringing different languages, art histories and identities to our community. One of our key aims is to activate the knowledge each student has of their own context and materials.
Practice-based online arts education is relatively new. We launched in 2021 and we’re one of only a few fine art Higher Education degrees running online in the English-speaking world. We’re grounded by our position in Falmouth School of Art, an established and acclaimed art school in the UK, but we’re thinking about how to be hosts for new conversations and ways of working.
What are some of the stand-out student projects you’ve worked on?
KF: I’ve supported eight different showcases now, and I’m always impressed by the journeys students have taken. For example, Esther Johnson is based in the Cayman Islands, and her Final Major Project drew on her interest in declining craft practices. For Holding, she initiated an amazing socially engaged project, working with people in her local community whose knowledge of netmaking activated the history – and contingent future – of the local fishing industry.
In another recent project, Khoi Nguyen worked with his partner Nguyen Viet Trinh in Ho Chi Minh City to explore gender dynamics in the home. One of the most meaningful outcomes was the knowledge gained around the inseparability of art and life, as they explored the way in which gender dynamics leak into all lived experiences through installation and live performance. Beneath the Membrane was exhibited at Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in Vietnam.
JC: We’ve stayed in touch with Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts to think about how we might continue to work with that institution. Which is an example of the way in which we are working collaboratively with students, staff, researchers and arts organisations and universities globally. Esther’s work was also presented within the 4th Cayman Islands Biennial after she graduated. There are lots of connections that get seeded through our course community that are really exciting.
'Holding' by Esther Johnson
Can you tell us a bit about the kind of work online students produce?
KF: Esther’s project in The Cayman Islands is a good example of the range of approaches we see. The outcome wasn’t an exhibition, but a sharing event where the artist brought a net that had been co-made with participants to their workplaces. So the net went on its own journey around the Cayman Islands.
We also see very different kinds of practice: Khoi’s project in Ho Chi Minh City used performance and installation to examine gender dynamics materially. Module assignments support students to gain the skills they will need in professional practice, so students produce a professional-level proposal and portfolio for their Final Major Project. They then use this to establish relationships of trust with external organisations, partners and collaborators, and to create opportunities after graduating.
What sort of themes do students tend to explore in their work?
JC: Sustainability is a key recurring theme. We have a whole module dedicated to Sustainable Strategies which looks at sustainability through social, economic and environmental lenses. Many students are also asking questions about the place that their lived experience and biography has within their art practice, and how a piece that might be very personal touches other people’s lived experiences elsewhere.
SS: How the personal overlaps with the collective are two things we’re always negotiating as artists: in the things we make, but also in how we frame or situate that within other forms of creative output. And then there’s this notion of “thrutopia”: the idea that what we do can have some kind of impact or healing effect. A lot of students are turning to ecological concerns and thinking about the earth as a dynamic entity; a form of agency we can be part of.
How do online students bring their exhibitions together?
JC: Students curate their own projects and engage audiences in their local communities. So whilst we explore different ways to work with new technologies to bring works together and create online encounters, we might also be understood as a ‘multi-site’ course. Students learn how to document their artworks on the ground and share them with someone who’s not there to meet that print, painting or sculpture in person. We can’t get away from the fact that there are challenges there. But this is a really valuable professional practice skill and we are practicing it together all the time.
SS: As a Tutor, I enjoy learning how to present work online using Falmouth’s different virtual platforms. I’m also learning, alongside the students, to work out how to address questions of closeness and materiality.
How do you build community on an online course?
KF: We’ve had students sending work across the world for exhibitions or group shows they’ve co-organised. They share resources too – travelling to visit each other if they’re in the same part of the world. They are finding ways to support and sustain each other at a distance, which has been brilliant to witness.
JC: Students work with the same enrolment group throughout their two-year journey and often get really close. We have an optional annual in-person gathering, and there are student networks producing projects together beyond the course. There is also a growing alumni network that encourages us to stay in touch.
SS: I’m always really pleasantly surprised by the closeness that emerges in the tutor group webinar format, especially in smaller groups. There’s something about “having skin in the game”, everyone committed and having a role to play whether they attend live, or stay in touch via our recordings.
How does collaboration work on an online Fine Art MA course?
JC: Writers and researchers Fred Moton and Stefano Harney refer to the “irregular polyrhythms” of collaborating at a distance and I think that’s very pertinent to us. We move in and out in different rhythms, but we have these points of contact: weekly live teaching sessions, discussion forums that people can dip in and out of at any time, one-to-one tutorials on our final module.
KF: Being an online MA opens up possibilities for different kinds of knowledge to be transferred across time and space, irrespective of geography. But equally, we encourage students to think about the local as a site using their own situated knowledge and what is intimate or close in their environment that can act as a conduit to broader questions. So, we’re thinking about both kinds of context simultaneously.
What aspects of teaching online do you find most interesting – or challenging?
JC: Working on this course has made me think about where my research interests intersect with my teaching. On campus, you’re all gathered in person with studios to test things in. But our students are out there doing it whilst they’re enrolled with us. They’re curating their own exhibitions, holding their own in very different locations and testing how their work travels through virtual space.
SS: I’ve also learned a lot about my own pedagogy – learning alongside the students. There’s this closeness that can emerge in the online format that I find genuinely surprising and pleasing.
KF: Students initially find it quite challenging, as there’s a much greater focus on independent learning and peer support. But I’m always impressed by the outcomes we celebrate at graduation. Through the five modules, experimentation and research, students arrive at the end with a real sense of their own agency.
What’s next for the MA Fine Art Online at Falmouth?
JC: Watch this space. We’ve got a growing alumni community doing really exciting things. Wherever you are in the world – whether you’re near an art centre or big exhibition space, or not – you should have a way to join the conversations you’d like to be part of. That’s what a good MA should equip you to do, and it’s what we’re aiming for. We’re so delighted to see our students achieving that.
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