Ceramics & Glass

The spectrum of enquiry is driven by live and studio projects. We’ll explore archives and collections to understand, question and reinterpret how the histories and traditions of our disciplines inform contemporary culture. Our relationship with site, communities and the built environment provides a framework for developing proposals. Specialist tutor-led group work focuses on areas such as metaphorical and phenomenological meaning within materiality. Finally, you’ll explore design-led ideas through object use, and the systems of production that they emerge from.

Drawing on our diverse network of contacts within the subject specialisms, lectures, artist talks and professional practice seminars from industry leaders are combined with field trips and practical skill sessions to support independent learning. Studio culture is nurtured within dedicated facilities that offer opportunities for collaborative and cross-disciplinary approaches – all aimed at developing the next generation of leading Ceramics & Glass graduates. Alongside programme-specific delivery, theory and contextual studies will be delivered across the Applied Art disciplines, situating and contextualising a material-led practice's thinking (and making) into the broader world.

Term 1

Interrogating Your Practice and Deconstructing Assumptions (45 credits)

This unit focuses on developing tools for deconstructing and critiquing your own practice and previous methods/approaches, as well as providing new contexts and directions for your work. Emphasis is placed on inviting new thoughts and progressive ideas through which to develop a ceramics and glass practice. During the unit you will be offered a series of opportunities to explore techniques, collections, environments alongside new modes of thinking aimed at challenging and expanding your current perception of Ceramics & Glass practice.

You will choose a Platform through which you will more closely align with the research interests of a smaller group of students. These Platforms are reactive to contemporary concerns and driven by staff research. Tutors leading these groups will deliver content which allows a particular vantage on the wider disciplines of Ceramics and Glass. The Platforms curriculum will be delivered via one-to-one tutorial, group critique, a workshop, a site visit/study, and seminar around the Platform theme. Platforms are to be understood as points of departure for experimental and investigative self-directed practice, as well as facilitators for peer learning in relation to creative ambition.

You'll also take AcrossRCA (15 credits), which supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

Term 2

Developing Methodologies (30 credits)

Throughout this unit, you will explore themes situated within wider material culture particularly those revealed by self-directed study via the lens of a Ceramics & Glass practice. Through experimentation and research, you will establish and develop the methodologies that will define their emerging practice. Developments and lines of enquiry formulated in Interrogating Your Practice and Deconstructing Assumptions, and through the Platform, will act as a background for the production of a body of work. You will be required to write your proposal and develop the summative project for the Independent Research Project by the middle of this unit.

Urgency of the Arts (School-Wide Unit) (15 credits)

In term 2, School of Arts & Humanities Master's students will participate in a School-wide unit The Urgency of the Arts. In this unit we ask how arts and humanities research and practice can engage with our current socio-political climate, and how might it shape, be necessary and essential in contemporary cultural debates.

The unit introduces you to a diverse range of perspectives, approaches and methods relevant to contemporary practice and thought in the arts and humanities. The delivery, predominantly based on workshops and featuring specialist presentations by leading artists, aims to assist you in recognising, questioning, expanding, and reevaluating your own artistic practices and disciplinary assumptions. Through interactions with staff and students from across the School, as well as through a variety of methodological approaches, you will develop an understanding of the contemporary concerns that shape and influence artistic practice. You will be encouraged to reflect on these as a means to articulate the potential of your own work within the context of broad cultural landscapes and urgent cultural debates.

You'll also take the Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career.

Term 3

Independent Research Project (60 credits)

The Independent Research Project offers a point of synthesis through public exhibition, critical reflection and the production of a Print Ready Portfolio. Contracted and visiting staff from the programme support you to acquire advanced understanding of practice-led methodologies, critical reflection, production and presentation. Here, the IRP supports you with the specific conceptual and material demands of exhibiting and sharing their work and uses this to prepare you for the diverse professional practices of contemporary art and design.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.