Our MA Ceramics course is a project led and studio based programme with tutorial guidance, where you'll produce high quality work through rigorous academic research and creative studio practice.
You'll have the opportunity to create a range of objects, experiment with different materials and processes, and develop your individual style and creativity. Our MA supports a wide range of ceramics practices, including historical, traditional and contemporary, and will encourage innovation in ceramics design and technology.
We'll guide you in maximising your talent and creative ability, so you'll be able to further develop your skills for future engagement with the arts, crafts and design industries.
Our courses are designed for talented, self-motivated individuals wishing to work at the forefront of artistic, creative industries and enterprises.
This course benefits from a cohort of expert staff that includes the nationally and internationally acclaimed ceramicist Professor Magdalene Odundo OBE and Nicholas Lees, as well as a number of visiting artists such as Steve Brown and Clare Twomey.
Throughout the course, you'll have the opportunity to broaden your knowledge and experience by working with your peers from other specialist courses at UCA Farnham, such as our Textiles, Jewellery, Metalwork and Glass courses.
Our Farnham campus boasts first-rate facilities with extensive workshops and equipment to support your study. It's also home to our Crafts Study Centre - a purpose built museum, research centre and gallery dedicated to crafts. The Crafts Study Centre possesses the world's most coherent collection of Leach pottery and a stunning collection of work by Lucie Rie, as well as contemporary makers such as Edmund de Waal.
Our Farnham campus provides first-rate facilities with extensive workshops and equipment to support your study. It's also home to our Crafts Study Centre - a purpose-built museum, research centre and gallery dedicated to crafts.
As part of this course, you'll have access to well-established industry connections. These include:
-Historical research, exhibition and curation with the Watts Gallery
-Links with Froyle Tiles and Lambs Terracotta - providing an opportunity to research interior and exterior architecture, along with restoration and renovation projects
-Local production of Dartington Pottery at the nearby Grayshott Pottery - beneficial to those researching surface and glaze
-Farnham-based 318 Ceramics and the New Ashgate Gallery Trust.
Our MA Ceramics course will equip you with a host of valuable and transferable skills. Upon successful completion, you might decide to become a self-employed artist, or forge a career within the craft and design industries.
Recent graduates work as:
-Artists
-Designers
-Makers
-Arts administrators
-Gallery curators
-Teachers
-Writers.
Visit our Postgraduate Virtual Media Space to find out more about our courses, see what it's like to study at UCA and gain access to our campus virtual tours.
This course is for materially engaged makers who are looking to explore craft practices across a range of materials and object types. The programme encourages the development of craft across specialist and multi-material making, as you investigate and explore definitions of craft practice.
Your work may already encompass making in a specific area such as glass, ceramics or jewellery, which you are wanting to develop or expand. This course will encourage you to progress and challenge your practice, to explore genre-breaking approaches to material and process making.
Using the wide range of hand, machine and digital technologies at Manchester School of Art, you will work within, across and between definitions of craft, to evolve and progress a unique and personal making practice within contemporary craft.
The programme is supported by a comprehensive range of workshops for hand, machine and digital making. In addition to traditional material making workshops in ceramics, glass, metal, wood, textiles and bookbinding, there are digital making facilities for CNC routing, rapid prototyping, plasma & laser cutting, and digital print for textiles & ceramics. Students have access to a wide range of specialist academic and technical expertise from across the School of Art, to support the development of a wide range of craft making practices.
Design Network
Based in the heart of the School of Art, MA/MFA Design: Craft is part of an innovative design network — a community of staff and students exploring design ideas in a discursive, cross-disciplinary studio environment. Critically informed practical designers, the group works experimentally, inspired by new insights and possibilities.
While studying towards a particular qualification at MA/MFA level, students experience their subject in the broader context of contemporary design practice.
Dedicated spaces for the postgraduate community have been developed to enable the postgraduate community to flourish. These spaces, for thinking and practice, are located centrally within the School of Art, allowing easy access to an extensive range of workshops where the combination of traditional and state of the art equipment opens up a world of exciting possibilities.
The spirit of Ceramics & Glass at the RCA springs from the heart of those media, and a belief in the transformative power of material thinking, research and making to enrich our world in imaginative and meaningful ways. The programme is a site for contemporary discourse where personal concerns and global perspectives intersect. We seek those with passion to extend the possibilities and perspectives of ceramics and glass within and beyond traditional limitations, informed by their rich provenance of materials and practices.
The Ceramics & Glass MA at the RCA provides outstanding opportunities to develop a dynamic, informed and connected practice in a study environment that embraces diversity and depth. We believe in interrogating practices and challenging conventions.
Our hyper-material age presents exciting and critical opportunities to explore cultures of production; to ask questions about what, why and how we make; to express ideas through the symbolic modes of things and transformative character of substances, and to consider how our work can influence physical, personal and psycho-social environments. We challenge and encourage you to stretch your imagination, expand your potential and find your voice.
The MA spectrum of enquiry includes art and design works, design for manufacture and the built environment, emerging experimental practices and applications. Curiosity is nurtured through the imaginative exploration of concepts, the investigation of material properties and technologies, the potential of interdisciplinary practice and collaboration. Making, thinking and writing skills are integrated to develop critical perspectives of practice and purpose, and to foster new understandings of our interaction with ‘things’.
The exceptional ceramic and glass facilities at the Royal College underpin a dynamic study environment led by outstanding teachers and technical experts, supported by contributions from peers, acclaimed visiting lecturers and graduates, who have shaped the programme’s leading research and international standing over many years.
The MA study experience integrates studio-based project learning with a formal dialogue in Critical & Historical Studies, scaffolded by the rigour of enquiry and reflective practice. Workshops, lectures, visiting experts and collaboration opportunities are supplemented by seminars and personal tutorials to provide guidance, foster critical reflection and encourage the development of individual trajectories and ambitions.
The programme offers:
This course is a radical post-disciplinary programme for practitioners who want to push the boundaries of what design can be and do. During this MA we work with you to transform your practice as a critical and social undertaking.
By challenging the role and norms of traditional design towards an emerging type of ‘advanced design’, unshackled from the history of specialisms and entrenched methods, you will become part of a community of practice. You will be encouraged to actively contribute to a deep understanding of how design is set to address and affect change within contemporary society.
Whatever your background or previous degree we expect you to examine your own practice. This might be in a traditional field of design such as graphic design, product design, fashion design, interior design etc. Other fields such as teaching, social science, humanities, curating, engineering, science and business are also considered practices and welcome on the programme.
The programme is structured around thematic areas of investigation (Studios) which situates you (the practitioner) in a particular field of study and reference. Each Studio will be encouraged to build an identity within the programme; supporting diverse practice, building a rich identity and attracting a broad range of applicants.
The studio offering will be tailored each year to the skills/expertise of applicants and in response to the changing nature of the design field and the world around us. The studios running for 2018/19 are:
You can find out more about each of these studios in the Studios tab below.
The programme runs for 15 months over five 10-11 week Terms and is full-time (this means a minimum of 4 days per week). It is largely delivered through project briefs (both working in groups and individually), which allows an experimental and exploratory design process.
The projects open up opportunities for you to work collectively on research projects, external industry briefs and wider design research themes. Through this process, you'll evolve a design practice that is progressive but also thoughtful, critical and grounded in the complex realities of the world.
Throughout your projects you'll benefit from the input of experienced practice-based staff, as well as world-class visiting practitioners. These projects are all part of three interconnected modules that make up the MA Design Expanded Practice programme:
For Studio Expanded Practice in the first term you will also respond to a shared project brief supported by wide range of design staff from the department and guest speakers. This initial project will be run across the whole masters programme, to build your practice working alongside and in collaboration with the diverse cohort of design students. This will be a combination of scheduled sessions (lectures, workshops, tutorials) as well as self-directed studio or fieldwork amounting to 3 days per week.
In addition to this project you will choose to situate yourself within a studio, and spend one day a week in your studio of choice, where you will be exploring discourses through talks and seminars, engaging with methods and processes appropriate to the studio's focus. This will give you a body of knowledge that will equip you to act in design in your area of interest and continue as weekly session throughout Terms 1, 2 and 3.
In Terms 2 and 3 (Design Transfocality) you will be selecting a project from a choice of three projects each term. Each of these projects will be made up of students from all of the Studios. The aim is to bring your interests to the particular project to shape it for the development of your own practice.
In Term 4 (Summer period) you will select an externally focused project (Extended Study), like our annual summer school in Paris (eg. Design and Performance), or a placement with an external organisation.
You return to Goldsmiths for Term 5 to pull together your body of work and concluding design outcomes (culmination of Studio Expanded Practice) for public engagement through various public facing platforms (eg. publication, exhibition, symposium)
This is an intensive, vocational course with strong professional links to the industry, offering a maximum of four students, with high levels of painting and drawing skills, the opportunity to develop their careers as scenic artists. The skills and techniques acquired on this course are to the level necessary for theatre, television, film and animation industries..
During the year students acquire an understanding of professional practice and standards, and gain in-depth skills and experience in scenic art techniques and their application, combined with the practice of managing a scenic art department.
The Course has 3 very intensive terms during which students paint the sets for the School’s six main house public productions, offering them the opportunity to see their finished work used on stage in a wide range of public performances and venues. Teaching is led by the School’s Head of Scenic Art in collaboration with visiting industry professionals who provide master-classes in a range of skills and techniques that include; life drawing, portraiture, perspective, marbling, wood-graining, polystyrene carving and painting for animation. The scenic art students work collaboratively with the School’s other production departments, and most especially with design students. Furthering their introduction to the industry, work placements with principal companies are arranged during the course; particular attention is placed on students developing their own professional portfolio. Upon graduation students will showcase their work in a public exhibition and be interviewed by some of the UK’s leading industry practitioners. In a freelance industry most of our graduates begin working as assistants for scenic artists, scenic workshops and large theatre companies, eventually becoming supervising scenic artists themselves.
Recent graduate employment includes: The Royal Opera House, The Royal Shakespeare Company, Cardiff Theatrical Services, The Royal National Theatre, Northern Ballet, TR2 Plymouth, Richard Nutbourne - Cool Flight Ltd, Rocket Scenery, Cameron Mackintosh’s National and International Tour of ‘Mary Poppins’, Disney's ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Frozen’ on Broadway. Festival work includes ‘Boomtown’ and ‘Glastonbury’. Film work includes: Wes Anderson's ‘Isle of Dogs’ (UK release - March 2018), Tim Burton's ‘Frankenweenie', Aardman Animations' ‘Shaun the Sheep’, ‘Pirates’ and ‘Early Man’ TV work includes: 'Will' for TNT’, ‘Crazy Face’ for Netflix and 'Good Omens' for the BBC.
The course is aimed at both professional practitioners wishing to pursue a sustained period of time developing new ideas or recent graduates wishing to focus their studies and refine ideas at an advanced level. The course will also consider students from a non-industrial / product background, providing they can offer clearly articulated and informed reasons for wishing to study Product Design at an advanced level.
A student defined placement module in the second semester of studies allows the student to further explore areas of relevance to their studies, either through arranged placement, collaborative activity or research visits. As well as ‘hard skills’ such as modelling, new product development, styling and product graphics, they are now also beginning to embrace the ‘soft skills’ of branding, user interface design, trend spotting and forecasting. Spin offs of these activities can now be seen as production management, new start up initiatives / own product development, corporate identity and qualitative market research
Students will be supported by staff input through a series of design activities during semester one that are designed to identify an area or interest that can then be fully explored through the following two semesters. Complementary to the design modules are two research modules that provide theoretical underpinning. There are opportunities to explore issues through a dynamic research experience that again is defined and structured by the individual. The final semester of studies allows students to bring together all that has been developed and researched during the course.
We have well equipped studios and workshops, supported by highly skilled technical staff. Supporting the craft workshops and design studios, we have excellent suites of high spec computers for CAD, assignment writing and image manipulation. The University has excellent library / study facilities with a very extensive collection of design books and periodicals, together with many e-resources and support.
Graduates have developed successful careers within a wide range of design related disciplines, including designer / maker, freelance or in-house designer for manufacturing, teacher, design buyer and design manager to name a few.
The research-led Textile Design MA addresses the needs of graduates from textile design and related discipline backgrounds, or those who wish to collaborate with professionals in the field. MA Textile Design is one of several postgraduate design courses that co-exist at the Cass, offering rich opportunities for the collaborative multidisciplinary approach that is a feature of the current and future design sector and a requirement for success in the field.
The course is grounded in the understanding that design is a key driver for change in society and the environment. However, traditional roles in design are increasingly blurred and designers need to be able to negotiate complex and ambiguous problems. This means that the challenges and opportunities for design and designers are being constantly reimagined, as the unpredictability of the future tests our capacity to adapt, invent and apply creative design solutions to emerging needs.
Graduates of this course will challenge conventional ideas of what textiles are, and will design textiles and textile products that have not yet been conceptualised.
