The MA in Fine Arts can be completed with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting. This degree program provides students with the creative and technical skills needed to thrive in today’s art world. Students will leave with professional-level portfolios and an understanding of the business of art.

MA Fine Art (Ceramics) at Bath Spa is designed to fully develop your creative potential as a ceramicist within a Fine Art context. We encourage you to experiment and take risks before going on to establish your strategy for practice. You’ll develop skills and knowledge through an exciting combination of practice, research, and professional development.

This studio-based MA Fine Art course allows you to develop your creative potential in a cross-disciplinary environment, using specialist equipment and drawing on the expertise of practicing artists and skilled technicians at our Locksbrook campus. Working with students from across the Bath School of Art, Film and Media, and School of Design, you’ll study a range of approaches including painting, sculpture, live art, and photography, to further your skills and knowledge in your specialist area. You’ll identify your position as an artist, develop the appropriate technical skills, and learn how to promote and exhibit your work professionally.

This unique research-based programme for artists fosters a deep inquiry into artistic practices through research. Fine Arts supports artists to develop a profound conceptual and aesthetic approach to their practice and achieve a level of professional excellence required by the demands of a dynamic contemporary art landscape.

MA Fine Art is an opportunity to look at the familiar with a fresh, perhaps oblique perspective in order to explore how “detour” permits “access” (Jullien 2004) to more subtle yet more complex interpretations. What constitutes a meaningful and useful research methodology in one culture may be considered unknown, unnecessary or redundant in another. These differences are at the very fabric of the Fine Art course; establishing deliberate cross-cultural dialogues with students from International and UK backgrounds and providing a vehicle for highlighting differences in working practices and methodologies.

The Master in Fine Arts is the natural continuation of the Bachelor of Arts in Painting and Visual Arts and Sculpture and Installations. Nevertheless, it may also be attended by students who come from other educational backgrounds and who wish to complete their studies by studying contemporary art.

The MFA Fine Art programme is aimed at artists and recent graduates who want to advance their art practices, engage with the relationships between contemporary art and theory and consider what art might be in relation to today’s social, cultural and political situations.

Contemporary Art Practice (CAP) at the Royal College of Art is a cutting-edge MA programme in the School of Arts & Humanities that is driven by a post-medium, critical approach to the making and reception of art, where theory and practice come together to form new ways of responding to the contemporary world. The programme supports the development of your art practice within a responsive, dialogical and critical context with an emphasis on wider political issues – interrogating art production in relation to urgent socio-political contexts as well as questioning and redefining practice.

The Art and Visual Culture MA is part of the Cultural and Literary Studies Suite, a cluster of four MAs that bring together academics, curators and practitioners who share a commitment to investigating modern and contemporary culture from aesthetic, critical, literary, and experiential perspectives. You'll share classes with students from the Cultural and Critical Studies MA, the English Literature: Modern and Contemporary Fictions MA, and the Museum, Galleries and Contemporary Culture MA, joining a fruitful and intellectually-rigorous environment designed to facilitate the sprouting of interdisciplinary thinking. As part of our Suite, you may also choose an option module from the other three MA programmes (what is referred to as an ‘elective’ module), a fantastic opportunity to explore a facet of culture outside of your chosen MA programme. The Art and Visual Culture MA is an interdisciplinary, visual theory-based course established around the belief that visual literacy and the impact of visual forms of thinking and working play significant roles in our society. In the course, we interrogate visual perception and representation in high and popular culture, explore how these produce meanings, and how such meanings shape societies and individuals.

The MA/MFA Art and Social Action is 1-year a postgraduate programme focused on trans-disciplinary practice and thinking that privileges collaborative approaches to production and creative approaches to social transformation, emphasising the capacity of art practice to imagine our world differently.

The MA/MFA in Photography and Image-Making focuses on new types of visual storytelling: still image, moving image, and multimedia, with a curriculum that emphasizes new media and transdisciplinary skill sets, and understands photography as a hybrid and emerging art form.

The research can be conducted by means of a dissertation (BKS 858), a dissertation and solo exhibition (BKS 859) or a dissertation and curated exhibition (BKS 860).

The MFA in Art & Ecology provides an immersive education in the development of professional practice as an ecologically oriented artist.

Contemporary Art MA is a two-year international program for emerging contemporary artists of different backgrounds intended to guide them during the development of their artistic position. The main focus is on the individual artistic practice, supported by collaborative moments in the curriculum as well as masterclasses and courses introducing a range of artistic methods and platforms for research and critical reflection.

MA Painting at the Royal College of Art is a world-leading, studio-based MA programme with a successful record of turning out artists working at the forefront of the discipline and of international standing. Through our innovative approaches to teaching and learning, we foster a student to consider painting as a creative, self-reflexive, and critical activity that draws on a wealth of diverse historical, material and conceptual disciplinary resources as it thrives in the 21st century.