Painting

There will be several opportunities to collaborate with others, but at a minimum, your programme will include 248 contact hours and 1552 independent study hours. Contact hours can consist of lectures, seminars, tutorials, critical forums and workshops, among other types of teaching delivery.

Teaching types included in your programme can consist of briefings, projects, tutorials, seminars, lectures, critical forums, technical inductions, technical workshops, offsite visits and blended learning.

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.

Term 1

In Establishing a Painting Practice (45 credits), you will understand what informs the content, subject matter, form and execution of your work, as well as establish the audio, visual and material research that feeds your work and practice. This unit will begin with a series of technical inductions, artist lectures and seminars presented by the Painting faculty to help you establish and orient your practice within the broader painting field. Establishing a Painting Practice supports you as you produce work, locate their work within a critical context while reflecting on historical and contemporary approaches to painting, ultimately leading to the development of an innovative individual practice. Additionally, you achieve this through curricular content through seminars, workshops, individual tutorials, group critiques and off-site visits.

Term 2

In Painting in the Expanded Field: Experimental Positions (30 credits), you further examine and challenge the conceptual, aesthetic and material approaches to making that they developed in Unit 1. The goal of this unit is to encourage you to deepen your understanding of the future direction of your practice with an interdisciplinary focus on experimentation, execution and critical reflection. You will produce finished work at an advanced level and explore various modes of presenting. The end of this unit will culminate in a presentation and a written proposal for your IRP in preparation for the degree show presentation of your work in unit 3.

In the School-wide unit Urgency of the Arts (15 credits), 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 students to diverse 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 students in recognising, questioning, expanding, and reevaluating their 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, students will develop an understanding of the contemporary concerns that shape and influence artistic practice.

Students will be supported in understanding their work's possibilities, complexities and impact. They will be encouraged to contextualise it within broad cultural landscapes to recognise and emphasise its potential and the complex ways their work may be received and understood.

Term 3

The Independent Research Project (60 credits) is an opportunity to build a body of work that addresses the key ambitions of your research and practice. You will work towards presenting a work or works in the IRP Public Exhibition, which enables you to explore how to activate your work in a public context, experiment with the most appropriate forms of realising your ideas and gain critical feedback. The IRP exhibition takes place mid-way through the unit. It will be followed by a reflection and further development period, which emphasises planning for continued practice and research post-graduation.

The programme approaches the Independent Research Project as a self-directed study centred on an assessed presentation of your work as an exhibition, a publication and a research essay.

AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.

Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.

Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.

Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.