Program Overview

Our friendly studio-centred programme will help you to understand, make and participate in visual art and contemporary aesthetics. Study within a small, active cohort, while having access to and placements with a sweeping range of other fields of study – from artificial intelligence to zoology. Explore art-making through ceramics, digital fabrication, immersive technologies, installation, metal, painting and drawing, performance, printmaking, sculpture, video and photography, wood and writing.

Your first year is about exploration of materials, processes and ideas. You’ll examine the diverse traditions of fine art up to the present day. There’s ample studio time to try out different techniques and technologies from painting to digital media. Building critical analysis skills through interaction with other students and teaching staff will boost your confidence and you will be introduced to interdisciplinary art practices, working in response to the global challenges that we face today.

Key features

• Facilities. You will have inductions in and access to a wide range of specialist workshop facilities to advance your artistic enquiry, including letterpress and printmaking, ceramics, woodworking, metal, video, photography, audio, immersive and augmented technologies, and digital fabrication processes like 3D printing.
• Studio culture. Our main teaching and learning space is the studio and we place emphasis on creating a friendly, supportive, vibrant, creative, critical and reflective studio environment. You will work in dedicated studio spaces and specialist workshops through a mix of practical exercises, one-to-one and group tutorials, critiques, seminars and interactive lectures, artist talks, fieldwork, and field trip opportunities.
• Thinking through doing. This is a practice-based programme, which means that critical enquiry is at the heart of making work. We encourage you to be exploratory and experimental, to think through making and to embrace uncertainty and not knowing. You will be making and showing work in the studio and out in the city through relationships with Plymouth's exciting artist communities.
• Interdisciplinary. The University of Plymouth is a broad-based university, internationally recognised for its research into marine science, climate change, biomedical and health sciences and across the arts and humanities. Studio practice modules and the common challenges and dissertation modules offer you opportunities to work collaboratively with researchers and practitioners across the University and out into the city and region.
• Collaboration. You will collaborate with partners through placements in organisations like KARST, The Box, the University of Plymouth Arts & Culture Programme, the Marine Institute and the Sustainable Earth Institute, and you will exhibit work both on- and off-site throughout your degree.
• Degree show. Showcase your final project in a faculty-wide exhibition alongside students from our 12 art and design degrees. The Degree Show is your chance to introduce friends and family, your new creative network and art community, prospective employers and the general public to your work.