Fine Art (Extended Degree)

Arts University Plymouth is an arts university for the 21st century, preparing students who are uniquely placed to provide creative solutions to the complex global challenges of a changing world. Formerly known as Plymouth College of Art, we were granted full university title in Spring 2022. We are now the city of Plymouth’s first and only specialist arts university, allowing us to offer our students a dynamic and unique learning experience.

If you want to pursue a creative degree at Arts University Plymouth but feel you have yet to acquire the experience and range of skills necessary, our Extended BA course will prepare you for entry to one of our BA (Hons) undergraduate courses. This four-year route offers an exploratory year, developing your insight into a range of art, design and media skills and approaches, before focusing on your Fine Art degree.

Our Fine Art course is, at its core, rigorous and questioning, encouraging an ambitious diversity of approaches in thinking and making. Promoting an interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary art, we encourage an ambitious, self-directed and critically engaged approach to developing creative practice. This is a dynamic course where you will gain skills to critically question and actively create.

The course is characterised by its focus on the development of individual practice-based study through exposure to a wide variety of material methods and modes of art practice. Led and supported by a stimulating community of creative practitioners, the core academic team are experienced artists who are active makers, writers and researchers in contemporary fine art practice. The course encourages diversity in thinking and making, based on the potential in material exploration, collaborative working, cross-fertilisation of ideas and the exploration of new concepts and materials.

With opportunities for working collaboratively, deepening cultural understanding and exploring new processes in workshops, you’ll be working in a learning environment that provides a meaningful link between your studio practice and contemporary art theory. The course is interdisciplinary, enabling you to engage in workshops for drawing, sound, glass, installation, video, clay, performance, painting, scale and sculpture, projection mapping, wood, video, printmaking, critical writing, 3D casting in plaster, alginate, rubber and traditional sculptural practices.

The Fine Art course includes a framework of professional practice opportunities; you will develop an unrivalled understanding of the professional art world through our ongoing partnerships which include emerging and established galleries, museums, creative organisations and practising artists. You will develop a professional understanding of the creative activity of external partners and will be very well placed to enter the professional creative sector upon graduating.

We are committed to encouraging studio and post-studio practices, creating artwork that can inhabit a range of settings including galleries, artist-run spaces and site-specific or event-based projects. During your studies you are given and will also create regular opportunities to exhibit and test your practice in the public domain. We currently work with KARST gallery in Plymouth, and we have collaboration projects with Otis College of Art and Design in LA, Alfred University in New York and Winthrop University in South Carolina. The college’s onsite public exhibition space, MIRROR, also draws a range of national and international artists and exhibitions, allowing for the opportunity to engage with artists through related workshops, talks and screenings.

The course will teach you to take risks; this will situate you in the world as and active agent, and instil in you a sense of yourself as a thinker and maker. Study with us and you’ll expand your critical approach alongside developing rich skills in questioning, making and analysis.

The first year of an Extended Degree is not a qualification in its own right, but when you successfully complete it you are guaranteed a place on our full undergraduate programme.

You’ll develop confidence in your use of drawing, visual research, contextual studies, digital imaging and design methods, and you’ll have the chance to experiment with a range of materials, equipment, processes and software.

As the year goes by you’ll specialise in your chosen undergraduate subject (illustration, graphic design, fine art, etc.), helping you to become a confident, independent and creative artist, designer or maker.