BA (Hons) Craft & Material Practices

<p>Our spacious Materials Lab includes specialist facilities for ceramics, glass, metal and wood, encouraging you to explore traditional making alongside the rapid digital prototyping facilities in our Fab Lab, giving you the opportunity to reinvent craft for the 21st century. However learning isn’t limited to our design studios and workshops – you will meet some of the UK’s most inventive and entrepreneurial contemporary makers and thinkers through studio visits, demonstrations, and presentations.</p> <p>You’ll study specialist ceramics techniques such as throwing, slip casting, slab-building, coiling, glazing, and raku firing. Working with glass will include hot glass making, kiln-formed glass, coldworking and lampworking. Working with metals will see you casting, welding, and grinding. If you’re looking to specialise in wood-working, you’ll have the opportunity to learn woodturning, joinery, and CNC routing. In the Fab Lab you will experience laser cutting, CNC milling and 3D printing.</p> <p>Through the use of these traditional materials, as well as explorations in smart and adaptive materials, you’ll develop new modes of creative authorship through experimentation, research and invention.</p>

<p>Our ambition is that your material practice develops in an international context, and you’ll be given the opportunity to visit a number of current events such as Sieraad in Amsterdam, Collect at the Saatchi Gallery, British Ceramics Biennial, the Contemporary Craft Festival and New Designers.</p> <p>Recent contributors to the course include Steve Dixon, Pr Neil Brownsword, Caroline Broadhead, Dr Erin Dickson, Dr Wendy Gers, Sam Photic, Nuala Clooney, Mount Edgecumbe and Eden Project.</p>

<p>You’ll learn about enterprise and entrepreneurship, and how to price, display and promote work for a range of different markets including: large scale site specific work, individual exhibition pieces and domestic products, all based on knowledge of your customers and the experience gained by working on live briefs, pitching to clients and entering competitions.</p> <p>Study with us and you’ll expand your critical approach alongside developing skills in research and analysis. Our creative programmes encourage diversity in thinking and making - from practical applications through to reflective, analytical writing. You will also have access to our Making Futures biennial conference, offering you the chance to listen to critical discourses by international makers, curators and critics. <br /></p> <p>We provide a dynamic, stimulating learning environment from which to test new models of practice while investing in the rich relationship between practice and theory - based on the potential in material and visual exploration, collaborative working, cross-fertilisation of ideas, and the exploration of histories and contemporary contexts.</p>