BA in Fine Art
Birmingham City University
Key Information
Campus location
Birmingham, United Kingdom
Languages
English
Study format
On-Campus
Duration
3 - 4 years
Pace
Full time
Tuition fees
GBP 9,250 / per year *
Application deadline
Request info
Earliest start date
Sep 2024
* UK students: £9,250 per year | international students: £13,980 per year
Scholarships
Explore scholarship opportunities to help fund your studies
Introduction
Through the skilful manipulation of materials, processes and ideas artists are able to offer creative insights which shape who we are and how we exist in the world around us. These are valuable skills in the fast-changing and interconnected web of ecological, political and socio-economic and philosophical contexts.
Our BA (Hons) Fine Art course embraces important traditional making skills such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, digital media and performance, and places an emphasis on the fusion with new developments in creative practice framed within a professional working context to improve employability. This hybrid approach, coupled with discipline-specific studios and specialist workshops, will equip you to navigate the growing and changing face of the Creative Industries into the future.
What's covered in this course?
Our BA (Hons) Fine Art course is based on four key principles; Making Skills, Making Public, Making Communities and Making a Living.
Making Skills are developed through our purpose-built studio spaces where you can explore the materials and processes of painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, digital media and performance. The acquisition and application of technical skills are also developed in our workshops and by working with fabricators from across the vibrant city of Birmingham and beyond. These skills will act as the means through which to test, interrogate, and transform art practice both conceptually and aesthetically.
Making Public is focused on exploring art practice in the public realm. This involves expanded ideas of exhibiting and sharing outcomes that generate participation with broad audiences. You will benefit from live projects and our close links to high-profile establishments including Eastside Projects, Grand Union, Ikon Gallery and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. These opportunities will develop your thinking around the process of making your work public.
Making with Communities asks you to consider ways of building and sustaining meaningful relationships between your art practice and society. You will form Communities of Practice through studio groups before engaging with local, national and international organisations, gaining cultural and global experiences, perspectives and knowledge. This valuable experience will help you to define the kind of future practice you may wish to pursue.
Making a Living places an important focus on your own personal development and the multiple ways of building and growing a successful creative career. This involves establishing a professional context for your work through a situated knowledge of the art sector. The advancement of the digital world has afforded artists a wide variety of ways to thrive in a creative environment. You will be taught a whole set of new skills and behaviours necessary for you to be ready for the exciting challenges that await you in the world of employment beyond your studies.
Professional Placement Year
This course offers a professional placement year. This allows you to spend a whole year with an employer, between the second and third years of your degree and is a great way to find out more about your chosen career. Some students even return to the same employers after completing their studies.
The University will draw on its extensive network of local, regional and national employers to support you in finding a suitable placement to complement your chosen area of study. If you do not find a suitable placement, you will be automatically transferred back to the standard, non-placement version of the course.
Please note that fees are payable during your placement year, equivalent to 20% of the total full-time course fee for that year (£1,850 for UK students).
Why choose us?
- Margaret Street, the home of Birmingham School of Art, was the first municipal art school in the UK. Its Grade I-listed building has been the inspiration for countless artists and practitioners of international repute. It is a site of creative art practice that resonates with its rich history and as a fine art student, you would be joining a community of like-minded individuals who learn, make and grow here.
- You will work across specialist dedicated studio spaces which support the development of painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, installation, digital media and performance skills.
- Our emphasis on Making Skills, Making Public, Making a Living and Making with Communities places a focus on the development of technical and practical skills, valuable not only to the production of artwork but to your ability to make a living through employing these skills, post-graduation, within a number of sectors who you will build networks with.
- You will have regular opportunities to exhibit your work through curating student-led exhibitions in the School of Art and in spaces across the city, culminating in the Graduate Show in your final year.
- The course draws on Birmingham’s unique position as the No. 2 city in the UK. The city has a rich cultural and industrial history which is embedded in the course, students will engage with Birmingham’s past and with the exciting contemporary environment of the city today.
- The course's central location is positioned as part of the culturally diverse and thriving art scene of Birmingham. The relationship to the city and its range of communities, galleries and arts organisations is a defining and unique feature of the course. The course integrates skilled, informed and industry-ready students into the creative industries through public-facing and lives working opportunities with external partners.
Curriculum
Year one
At Level Four you are given real-world examples of diverse practitioners in order to gain knowledge and understanding of the structures and ecologies of contemporary art practice.
This is delivered concurrently with introductions to workshops and specialist studio spaces to allow you to begin to develop your own creative language, interests and skills whilst beginning to consider different ways of thinking about your own emerging practice and the world in which it sits.
You will learn how to research and drive forward ideas that will form the basis of your studio and workshop experiments. In turn, you will learn what it means to make art as a practice and how to communicate and nurture it through varied approaches. These approaches will embrace working both individually and supportively with others to share your work with wide-ranging audiences both within and beyond the University.
In order to complete this course you must successfully complete all the following CORE modules (totalling 120 credits).
- Making Studio
- Making a Living 1: Developing Skills
- Making Meaning
- Making Public
Year two
At Level Five the emphasis shifts to encompass a more individually driven approach that provides the opportunity to build on the skills gained at Level Four to grow your ideas both conceptually and contextually. Level Five also highlights the value of working outside of the School of Art to test out ideas in real-world contexts with external partners.
Through this instrumental experience, you will gain insights into the relationship between theory and practice; contemporary theoretical and social contexts, to think through how they relate to your own work. You will begin to consider the ways that you might sustain your practice and/or secure employment after graduation through the skills and experiences you acquire throughout the stages of the course.
In order to complete this course you must successfully complete all the following CORE modules (totalling 100 credits):
- Making Practice
- Making a Living 2: With Communities
- Making Critical
In order to complete this course you must successfully complete at least 20 credits from the following list of OPTIONAL modules.
- Work Placement
- Live Project
Core modules are guaranteed to run. Optional modules will vary from year to year and the published list is indicative only.
Professional Placement Year (Optional)
In order to qualify for the award of BA (Hons) Fine Art with Professional Placement Year a student must successfully complete the following module.
- Professional Placement Year
Final Year
In the final year of the course you will pursue an individual mode of study that is supported by a range of subject-specific staff and the configuration of this will be dictated by your developing art practice.
At this stage in the course you will confidently consolidate thinking, ideas, research and making to create a body of work which has a clear understanding of where it sits in the world. The public outcome of your final artwork will act as a springboard platform for your future career which will be underpinned by the comprehensive plan you will have prepared for life after graduation.
As a community, we value and encourage your engagement with us after your course ends and we have developed a number of helpful ongoing learning approaches to continue to support our important alumni.
Throughout the course, your learning is supported by technical workshops, lectures, presentations, seminars and live project briefs. There are multiple opportunities to collaborate with others and to select your own individual pathway through the course (through optional module choices).
In order to complete this course you must successfully complete all the following CORE modules (totalling 120 credits).
- Major Project (Making Research)
- Making a Living 3: Professional Practice
- Making Exhibitions
Career Opportunities
Enhancing your employability skills
With an increased focus on the importance of visible and viable career routes, the BA (Hons) Fine Art course at Birmingham City University explicitly deals with the importance of employability by embedding professional practice skills needed to allow graduates to ‘make a living’ in all modules. Digital competencies, project management, communication and problem-solving skills are a few of the key attributes the course develops.
The ambitious, student-centred approach to the curriculum, informed by professional practitioners and researchers, will enable you to become imaginative, confident and convincing in the taking and shaping of your future roles. Graduates will become creative leaders and practitioners of change.
Art is a highly individual practice and can often have a high degree of self-reflection but it is always a professional practice. Through a programme of lectures and seminars, we enable you, the artists of the future, to understand your own economy and your contribution to the economy of our societies.
Live working is at the heart of the course. It enhances employability by offering you professional experiences and job opportunities which provide you with the competencies, strategies and confidence needed to shape your own future and the future of the arts. By working with, for and alongside various organisations and stakeholders in the region, the course will demystify the hierarchical structures of the creative sector so you feel ‘at ease’ in these professional contexts.
Specifically, you will:
- Develop a range of technical making, professional and personal skills, transferable to a range of careers within the creative industries; from artists to directors, educators, curators, arts administrators and project managers.
- Develop your own practice and the ability to relate this to future employment options.
- Negotiate, plan exhibit and present work to a professional standard.
- Work independently and collaboratively.
- Be a self-motivated, organised, and effective learner.
- Establish meaningful networks and connections in the city with individuals, organisations and communities.
- Understand how to promote yourself through a CV, statement, the use of social media, LinkedIn and individual professional websites.
- Be able to respond to the rapidly evolving creative industries, to not only be ready for immediate employment but also for future evolutions within the industries through the long-term, future-fit skills you will acquire.
Placements
As a student in our BA Fine Art course, you will be offered the choice of taking one of the ADM Faculty Modules. Each module, delivered within the School of Art (across its BA courses), will have a live focus whether that be working collaboratively across the City with students from across the faculty, working in the industry on work experience placements or working with the community groups on live project briefs.
The Faculty-wide modules allow for the crossover and building of networks between courses. Through these modules you will be integrated into the City of Birmingham, engaging with local contexts and negotiating external relationships whilst developing key employability skills. Recent live projects have seen students working with; Eastside Projects, Wheatley Fellow Harun Morrison, Flat Pack Film Festival, Summerfield Stables in Hall Green, Turves Green Primary School and Tate Liverpool.
You will also have the option to take a year-long professional work placement sandwich year to spend time directly working in the industry through our BA (Hons) Fine Art with Professional Placement Year. This presents a fantastic opportunity to gain confidence, build experience and develop workplace skills before graduating through a work-based learning opportunity. If you choose this route you will be supported by the course team in researching your chosen area of work and given the advice to secure a placement (or placements) that enable you to develop key employability skills in a direct, interesting and meaningful way. It provides the opportunity to spend a year completing structured work experience anywhere in the world, before returning to Birmingham School of Art for the final year of the BA Fine Art course to apply what has been learnt working in the industry.
Links to industry
Birmingham School of Art has a wide array of links with partner organisations regionally, nationally and internationally. These partnerships provide opportunities for live working in a professional context and are an important part of the learning and teaching activities of the BA (Hons) Fine Art course. The course offers creative opportunities for you to gain direct experience in working with professionals within fine art and related fields on curatorial projects, cross-disciplinary opportunities, specialist masterclasses, external live projects and research-based activities.
Regional partners include: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Ikon Gallery, Eastside Projects, Midlands Art Centre, New Walsall Gallery, Vivid Projects, Recent Activity, Grand Union, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Hippodrome, the REP, The Library of Birmingham, Selfridges, Primary and Secondary Schools across the region.
National partners include: Arts Council England, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, and Tate Liverpool.
International partners include: BCU has established links with institutions both in Europe and the USA, as well as in Hong Kong and India.
The creative and cultural industries play a significant role in unlocking innovation and growth in other sectors. The creative industries are defined by the UK government as “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. The creative economy accounts for 1 in 10 jobs across the UK and Birmingham City University is one of the largest providers of graduates in creative disciplines of any University outside London and the South East.