MA Fine Art

This module is shared by all students studying on taught Art and Design postgraduate programmes.

The Transdisciplinary Practice module concerns the development of your individual practice. It sees you consider, adopt and implement a range of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods, to refine, extend, develop and critically reflect upon your own practice. This enables a deeper relationship to one's own practice by seeing it through the lens of other disciplines, and cultivates more sympathetic understanding of the contingencies of other practices and disciplines through the same process.

You will work as individuals or in groups, or establish new relationships and collaborations to produce innovative, visionary and speculative practical outcomes in the context of one or more disciplinary contexts.

The module enables you to propose, plan, organise, publish or promote your work and research. Outcomes could include proposals for applied creative projects, documentary of work in progress, exhibition of work(s), public presentations in symposiums, websites or printed publications.

Learning is predominantly through lectures, reading groups and seminars. You will be introduced to ongoing inter-multi-transdisciplinary projects in the Institute of Art and Technology (IAT) and in the Liverpool City region through guest speakers who will expose you to new ways of working. 

Peer review is a crucial part of the practice-based research experience and this is facilitated through student-led and tutor guided studio activities and critical reviews. At this level it is expected that you will show a high degree of motivation and ability to engage in self-directed study, demonstrating a level of scholarship, initiative and problem solving appropriate to Master's degree study.

This module is shared by all students studying on taught Art and Design, MA Cities and Immersive Media postgraduate programmes.

The Research Inquiry module aims to develop and improve your research and analytical skills. Analysis and problem-solving skills are critical to student employability and subsequent success in most types of careers post MA.

Students are immersed in a range of methodological approaches across the arts and social sciences, and will develop an in-depth understanding and knowledge of contemporary approaches to research in their field of study. This will be crucial in laying the foundation for developing their own subsequent projects.

A series of lectures and seminars will introduce you to current and emerging practice in relation to a diverse range of historical, theoretical and critical principles. Seminars will require you to share, discuss and evaluate ideas and practice with others.

You will read and discuss a range of primary and secondary texts in your chosen field(s) to develop critical thinking together with historical and theoretical knowledge.

The module culminates in the successful preparation and delivery of a professional project proposal and accompanying professional presentation.

Testing techniques and methods for producing formal and/or discursive artworks and evaluating these against individual and wider contextual concerns is the blueprint for developing a robust and relevant artistic practice for our times. The Studio Practice module supports a sustained critical engagement with materials, process, form and context, strengthening student’s understanding of how artworks signify and carry artistic inquiry through to professional, social and cultural levels of public dissemination. Access to facilities for 3D production, printmaking, FAB Lab, digital imaging and textile fabrication supplements studio provision for full-time students and supports professional engagement in technically informed production. On completion, successful students evidence a developing body of work that articulates an informed understanding of how their methods enhance and establish the public dissemination of their artistic inquiry.

The Major Project module reflects the summation of the postgraduate programme of study. It sustains tested, informed art practices that are motivated by disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary methods of artistic inquiry and supports the continued synthesis of learning across the programme. Production is increasingly self-directed with studio provision for full-time students facilitated by access to technical facilities for 3D manufacture, printmaking, FAB Lab, digital imaging and textile fabrication. On completion, successful students evidence their capacity to plan and execute a professional standard of the production and presentation of artworks in the public sphere.

Critical engagement with texts, artefacts and environments girders artistic endeavour. For artists, committed and curious acts of reading, listening and viewing inform the production of dynamic artworks that synthesise or problematise our engagement with the phenomena and practices of contemporary culture. The Critical Discourses module supports a deeper, more developed engagement with such research, and encourages students to appreciate the structuring, crafting, strengthening and refining of a written text as akin to the production processes within their own discipline. On completion, successful students evidence a self-reflexive understanding of artistic production as an effective method of contributing to debates that drive their work.