Fine Art

The preliminary and intensive Integrated Foundation in Art and Design is designed to develop your ideas, skills and confidence in readiness for progressing to year one of your degree programme.

This year provides you with the opportunity to identify, apply for, and secure professional experience, normally comprising one to three placements over a minimum of nine months. Successful completion of this module will demonstrate your ability to secure and sustain graduate-level employment.

By completing the module, you'll be entitled to the addition of 'with Professional Placement Year' to your degree title.

Before your Professional Placement Year, you'll work to secure your placement, constructing a development plan with your module leader and your placement coordinator from our Careers and Employability team.

On your return to University for your final year, you'll submit your Placement Portfolio, detailing your development on your placement, for assessment.

The course is aimed at the development of studio practice in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, performance and sound. The structure of the course leaves room for not knowing, experimentation, discovery, risk and innovation.

This course promotes curiosity, risk and innovation. It aims to develop your skills of analysis, self-criticism, reflection and communication – both verbally and visually – as well as the practical skills you need.

It is critical that you understand current and historical debates in art, and through a programme of Contextual Studies we encourage you to consider how theory and contextual knowledge is embedded in practice.

Throughout the course, you will acquire the skills you need to build a successful future. Taught sessions support you to photograph work, build blogs/websites, write artist statements, fundraise, network, manage projects and curate exhibitions.

Year one
Experimentation with materials, techniques and processes are foregrounded. You'll establish a way of working that is playful and analytical. Through this process you'll begin to recognise the themes that are emerging in your work. The year is filled with a range of inductions and workshops to support your practice.

Year two
This is a pivotal period of development in which we will support you to progress your ideas, conceptual strategies and processes. Experimentation remains key, alongside a greater emphasis on individual research, reflection and analysis. We will encourage you to develop a more focused awareness of the debates that surround your practice and continually test its boundaries and possibilities. Off-site exhibitions, projects and other initiatives support you to consider your work beyond the studio.

Year three
You'll build on and extend the ideas you explored in the previous year. As a final year student, greater emphasis is placed not only on a body of resolved, considered and well executed work, but also on work that is ambitious and takes risks. At the end of the year, you'll present work in a degree show that is open to the public.

The course is made up of summative and formative assessments. Formative assessment takes place with the work in the studio and is ongoing throughout the duration of the course. Feedback is given verbally and through written reports from a personal tutor. Summative assessments take place at the end of modules. Assessments take the form of a presented body of work, an exhibition, reflective/academic text or live presentations.

Teaching takes the form of one-to-one tutorials, group critiques, academic workshops, seminars, lectures and forums.

Our visiting lecture series is fundamental to our course and we are proud of the range of speakers we attract. Internationally acclaimed artists, curators and arts professionals give talks about their work, teach in the studios or deliver an exciting range of workshops driven by their research interests.

All the teaching team are engaged in their own practice and this is critical to the philosophy of the course.

To find out more about how we teach and how you'll learn, please read our Learning and Teaching Delivery Statement.

You can engage in off-site exhibitions throughout your course of study. Sites have previously included abandoned shops or buildings throughout the city or beyond.

After the degree show event at the Bath School of Art, Film and Media, our third year students are supported to take their degree shows to off-site venues. These shows have acted as a springboard for students to attract attention from galleries and other arts professionals.

Study visits play an integral part of the course, and we run one trip per semester for each year group.

Trips have included the Liverpool Biennale, Berlin (artists studio visits), Rome, New York, Venice Biennale, Paris (artists studio visits), Istanbul Biennale and The British Arts Show, Leeds.

Students are selected to take part in a residency on the Cornish coast and produce new work in response to the site. This work forms part of a national touring exhibition.

Our students take up a variety of work placements, internships or opportunities in the creative industry from the ICA, Hauser and Wirth, the Holburne Museum and Spike Island to working as assistants with internationally acclaimed artists or prestigious commissions in nationally acclaimed heritage sites.

Our graduates go on to become, among other things, professional practising self-employed artists, they become curators in established galleries or set up their own artist run spaces. We have alumni who are teachers or work in gallery education; others have gone onto work in conservation, TV, or Art Therapy.

Many of our alumni go onto further study at some of the UK’s top postgraduate courses including the Slade School of Fine Art, Chelsea School of Art and Design, The Royal College of Art, The Royal Academy Schools, Glasgow School of Art and the Courtauld Institute.

If you’re a full-time undergraduate student starting your first year at Bath Spa University, you can apply for the Certificate in Global Citizenship, which you’ll study alongside your degree.

You’ll gain global awareness and add an international dimension to your student experience, and funding is available. On successful completion of the programme, you’ll be awarded a Certificate in Global Citizenship. This is in addition to your degree; it doesn’t change your degree title or results.

As a BA Fine Art student you’ll benefit from access to comprehensive digital workshops and specialist art and design facilities, including:

• Our student service point at Locksbrook where you can purchase subsidised art and design materials, hire out equipment for free and collect Library resources
• Access to our well-stocked Library at Newton Park
• Specialist technical workshops across all of art and design
• Access to studio space where you can work on projects and refine your practice.

Throughout the course, you'll have access to a wide range of tutors for tutorials, academic workshops and critiques. All our students have access to exceptional technical facilities, technicians and technical workshops.

You'll have access to our huge range of facilities and resources, including:

• Individual studio spaces
• Gallery space
• Art shop
• Sculpture workshop
• Ceramic design studio
• Clay preparation and kilns
• Glaze laboratory
• Painting methods room
• Plastic workshop
• Metalwork workshop
• Woodwork workshop
• Printmaking – etching, screen print, lithography and letterpress
• Black and white photography workshops
• Wide format digital printing
• Digital imaging suite
• Photography lighting studio
• Bookbinding
• 3D printing