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Fine Art BA Honours

With access to the Grove, our specialist arts facility, and expert teaching from cutting-edge artists, you'll have the opportunity to develop and refine your creative identity
Code
W101
Start
September 2024
Duration
3 years full-time
6 years part-time
Attendance
Full-time
Part-time
Fees
£9,250 (UK)*
£16,600 (INT)*
Course leader
Dr Alexandra Kokoli

Why choose BA Fine Art at Middlesex?

Join a diverse creative community where learning and teaching extend from the studio to a professional network of leading art professionals in London and beyond.

Learn from some of the UK's leading fine art practitioners and academics (Dr Ergin Cavusoglu, Professor of Contemporary Art, Keith Piper, Assoc. Professor, Fine Art and Digital Media, Katherine Jones, Royal Academician, Prof Katy Deepwell) to develop your understanding of fine art, both historical and contemporary.

You'll be using superb studio facilities, including exceptional printmaking rooms offering silk screen, lithography, mono print, wood and lino cutting, etching and dry point options.

What you will gain

This course will give you the knowledge, skills, experience, and resilience needed to establish a sustainable career in the field of contemporary art and creative industries post-graduation. Part of your study will include a 4 week placement opportunity in year 2 which will increase your real world experience of the art world and help establish your visibility to a wider network.

You will also learn transferable skills, including practical and technological fabrication, visual and digital literacy, intellectual agility, and creative problem-solving.  And explore new and traditional print-making practices including silkscreen, etching, lithography, letterpress. With regular visits to world-class museums and exhibitions like Tate Modern and Tate Britain for inspiration and the opportunity to attend international showcases such as Frieze

Our students regularly receive prizes and accolades for their art practice, including the Freelands Painting Prize:

Fa Razavi, winner of the Freelands Painting Prize 2022

Sunim Rai, winner of the Freelands Painting Prize 2021

We have 145 years of experience delivering professional, creative and technical education that prepares students – like you – for success in global careers.

What you will learn

Your studies will be a combination of studio practice, professional studies, and critical approaches to art and visual culture.

As well as developing your critical and creative skills, you'll graduate with a range of transferable skills which prepare you for a range of careers. Many of our graduates have gone on to work as curators, art therapists, researchers, writers, photographers, and more.

In addition to our incredible facilities on campus, you will be within easy access of London's thriving art scene.

By joining us on this course, you'll have the chance to:

  • Learn from groundbreaking artists and writers with international profiles, including Keith Piper, founder of BLK Art Group, social art practice pioneer Loraine Leeson, art critic and feminist art expert Katy Deepwell, and renowned multimedia artist Ergin Cavusoglu
  • Make use of our outstanding facilities in the Grove, our specialist building for art, design, media and performing arts
  • Develop a critical understanding of visual culture and art's place within it
  • Enhance your employability by holding a work placement at an artistic or educational organisation.

3 great reasons to pick this course

  • Outstanding facilities
    Work in our incredible workshops with ceramics, printmaking, photography, woodwork, laser, 3D printing, metalwork and more
  • Industry-specific placements
    We are one of the few Fine Art courses to include a placement module that is specific to Fine Art
  • Visit London's galleries
    We're on the doorstep of London's vibrant art scene and will provide you with opportunities to show your work in public exhibitions

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About your course

This is a brief overview of what you will study each year:

Year 1

In full-time mode, your first year focuses on understanding and working with different models as a fine artist, ensuring you have exposure to all the different workshops and facilities available to you.

  • You will be supported towards establishing a self-directed practice, namely identifying, resourcing, and making work independently
  • You will be introduced to a range of media, their capacities, histories, and implications
  • You will be introduced to global visual cultures and their fruitful intersections with artistic practices
  • You will begin to orient yourself within art’s complex ecologies.

Year 2

In your second year, you will diversify and expand your skills, developing a deeper awareness of the critical demands of contemporary art.

  • You will develop your visual and material language as you experiment in your studio practice.
  • You will explore key concepts and debates in global art, using research and writing to begin to consolidate your thinking and situate your practice in contemporary contexts
  • This year includes options to study on the international exchange programme.
  • You will gain hands-on experience of curating and exhibiting
  • You will continue your investigation into art’s ecologies by undertaking and reflecting on a short placement.

Year 3

The final year of your degree enables you to consolidate and refine your art, developing your practice to a professional level.

  • You will gain confidence in presenting your work professionally, using purposefully chosen platforms and media, in preparation for a career in the arts
  • Your research into art and visual culture becomes self-directed, giving you the opportunity to research a topic of your choice under expert supervision
  • You will continue to gain hands-on experience of curating and exhibiting, culminating in your degree show.

Modules

  • Year 1 - Compulsory

    • Establishing a self-directed practice (30 credits)

      The module aims to:

      • Support students to refine a specialist approach that is underpinned by in depth awareness of research, contexts, processes or technologies relevant to their chosen area.
      • Provide students with the opportunity to fully integrate conceptual, critical, formal, material, technical and theoretical interests and skills through practice and documentation.
      • Shed light on the creative and critical potential of exploring relationships between practice, strategies of exhibition and display, and audience, ranging from individual studio-based practices through to the site-specific, collaborative or participatory, and from gallery-oriented to socially-engaged contexts.
      • Apply and communicate an informed and research-led approach to practice, processes and contexts through documenting their learning, experimentation and progress.
    • Introduction to Media, Sites and Situations (30 credits)

      This module aims to:

      • Introduce students to the key specialist pathways that make up multi- disciplined fine art practice, including critical practice, social art practice, drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, multi-media practice, film and sound.
      • Support students to establish an art practice through material, technical and conceptual exploration.
      • Introduce students to the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and broader social, political and community contexts.
      • Encourage the application of an imaginative and adventurous approach to specialist media materials, ideas, and process relevant to art practice.
      • Foster the flexible and imaginative application of skills & knowledge to a variety of contexts, both individually & collaboratively.
      • Introduce research as the basis for creative and critical practice.
    • Art Ecologies: Orientation (30 credits)

      This module aims to:

      • Introduce students to the so-called art world as an open system of interdependent structures and agents, in which they are already participants
      • Broaden students’ critical knowledge of how contemporary Fine Art is produced, distributed, mediated and curated.
      • Support each student’s individual ability to begin constructing a critically reflexive sense of self as a developing artist.
      • Empower students to claim a place in contemporary art ecologies.
    • Art and Visual Culture (30 credits)

      This module aims to:

      • Introduce the broad realm of today’s global visual cultures and their encounters with artistic practices.
      • Critically explore intersectionality and interdisciplinarity through specific instances of how vision, knowledge and power intersect.
      • Provide students with knowledge and skills to locate themselves between history and the present, critically negotiating their own place within the social and political realities that surround the making of art.
      • Support students towards developing their own research and intellectual work as part of intentional communities of practice.
      • Contextualise contemporary practice within historical contexts and visual culture’s regimes of representation, genres, and tropes.
  • Year 2 - Compulsory

    • Developing a self-directed practice (30 credits)

      The module aims to:

      • Initiate the development of individual art practices where ideas are explored through a range of making processes.
      • Help students establish a working momentum and develop as confident, reflective practitioners within the studio environment.
      • Support students to critically engage with practice and grow their confidence to contribute to peer discussions of their emergent practices.
      • Equip students with the ability to resolve the work they make in the studio, for public viewing, maintaining an exploratory and experimental approach.
      • Encourage students to engage with and value a range of processes and record their work in progress, maintaining documentation that reflects their development.
    • Media, Sites and Situations (30 credits)

      This module aims to:

      • Further develop students’ practice through the key specialist pathways that make up multi-disciplined fine art practice, including critical practice, social art practice, drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, multi-media practice, film and sound.
      • Foster a deeper understanding of the relationship between contemporary fine art practice and the broader social, political and community contexts through their personal artistic development.
      • Support students to apply further specialist skills & knowledge flexibly and imaginatively to a variety of contexts, both as an individual & collaboratively as a team.
      • Build students’ confidence as researchers into, around, and for art practice.
    • Art Ecologies: Placement (30 credits)

      This module builds on FNA1303’s introduction to art’s ecologies by putting a mostly theoretical engagement with different art organisations and different contexts of artistic labour to practice. We will learn from past (Artists’ Placement Agency) and evolving (Arte Util) examples of social art practice, in order to support each student to take an inventory of the unique toolkit that being an artist brings to the world of work. Students are supported in researching, holding, and reflecting on a short placement that could be either at an art’s organisation or another organisation that would stand to benefit from input from an artist.

    • Research and Critical Analysis (30 credits)
      • Develop students’ understanding of the histories and debates that define contemporary art worlds in their local/global dimensions.
      • explore the field of Contemporary Fine Art practice, its core concepts, histories and institutional realities by looking closely at the production, reception, and intention, as well as economic, social, and ideological aspects
      • delve into the critical understandings of race, class, sex, gender and sexuality introduced in FNA1930 into greater depth, conceived here as factors within the global developments of ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ art.
      • In dialogue with FNA2203, examine recent artistic investigations of medium (and the ‘post-medium’ condition), exploring the diverse forms that contemporary art practice takes.
      • Investigate art’s globalisation and the ongoing development of digital and analogue media for representation and the circulation of images.
      • Support students to further develop and expand their research skills and methods, in preparation for FNA3903.
  • Year 3 - Compulsory

    • Self-Directed Practice and Making Public (60 credits)

      The module aims to:

      • Enable students to consolidate and reflect on their practice while developing the transferable skill of independent learning.
      • Guide students in constructing a learning process distinctive to their own practice by drawing on a range of research methods and a range of conceptualisation and making strategies.
      • Encourage students to extend their engagement with contemporary art practice through encounters with a range of practices, discourses and contexts
      • Support students in becoming discerning, ethically oriented, and critically engaged practitioners, able to engage in contemporary debates surrounding art and cultures, making links across modules and disciplines
      • Encourage students to engage with and value process, supporting materials documentation and reflection in developing a body of work
      • Support students in developing and co-curating a substantial and coherent exhibition of work for assessment.
    • Working in the Arts (30 credits)

      This module represents the culmination of your exploration with art’s complex ecologies and aims to prepare students for entering the arts industries as a graduate of BA Fine Art and qualified, professional, art workers. It aims to:

      • Furnish students with the knowledge and skills to launch their career, from advice on funding to forging a creative CV and the right web presence.
      • Help students clarify the role that they want their practice and labour to play in art’s ecologies and in wider society, locally and globally.
      • Empower students to manage how their work could and should be seen, interpreted and understood by different audiences.
      • Examine questions of curating, displaying and disseminating students’ own practice and other contemporary art practices.
      • Explore how audiences engage with contemporary art practices, through analysis of field trips, exhibition visits, presentations and texts.
      • Guide students to produce appropriate documentation of their practice for both personal/developmental and professional/promotional uses.
    • Self-Directed Research and Thesis (30 credits)

      This module aims to enable students to identify and deliver a formal extended thesis, presented according to academic conventions. This will be the product of sustained and creative engagement with a range of research resources, on and offline, and it offers the chance to develop an in-depth understanding of an area of visual culture or contemporary art of relevance either to the student’s own studio-practice or their broader cultural and artistic interests. Students will be encouraged to use writing in a creative and purposive way, and to explore the broad possibilities of the form of the essay.

To find out more about this highly regarded course, please download the Fine Art BA Honours specification (PDF).

Each year, students from BA Fine Art participate in group exhibitions either online or in a physical spaces, where possible these include external gallery events.

  1. Teaching and independent learning
  2. Coursework and assessment

The facilities, studios and workshops at our purpose-built Grove building on campus in North London are recognised as among the best in country. With a wide range of specialist workshops, digital media, equipment, software and library facilities on-site you'll benefit from unique levels of access to both the latest forms of technology and traditional tools with expert support to help you develop your work.

Student support

We offer lots of support to help you while you're studying including financial advice, wellbeing, mental health, and disability support.

Additional needs

We'll support you if you have additional needs such as sensory impairment or dyslexia. And if you want to find out whether Middlesex is the right place for you before you apply, get in touch with our Disability and Dyslexia team.

Wellness

Our specialist teams will support your mental health. We have free individual counselling sessions, workshops, support groups and useful guides.

Work while you study

Our Middlesex Unitemps branch will help you find work that fits around uni and your other commitments. We have hundreds of student jobs on campus that pay the London Living Wage and above. Visit the Middlesex Unitemps page.

Financial support

You can apply for scholarships and bursaries and our MDX Student Starter Kit to help with up to £1,000 of goods, including a new laptop or iPad.

We have also reduced the costs of studying with free laptop loans, free learning resources and discounts to save money on everyday things. Check out our guide to student life on a budget.

How can the BA Fine Art support your career?

Internationally recognised and respected, BA Fine Art is a broad degree that develops your creative and critical abilities and is the best-established route into a rewarding career as a professional artist.

Transferable skills

This course also aims to help you develop an extensive range of valuable transferable skills that can lead you in any number of directions after graduation.

The course supports you to develop your independent thinking and problem-solving skills, highly useful when entering the job market. Bespoke professional practice modules allow you to gain the skills you need for your chosen field and information about pathways into them.

Our Fine Art graduates are able to think strategically, work flexibly, be highly organised and use their initiative, as well as having excellent written and verbal communication skills, making them highly employable in a broad range of careers.

Graduate job roles

Past graduates have gone on to be successful in a number of fields for example working as an artist, curator, photographer, digital media professional, art therapist, teacher, lecturer, designer, researcher, writer, community art worker, performer, media professional, and entrepreneur.

Notable alumni include artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Chris Alton, Benedict Drew, Hayley Newman, Serena Korda, Heather Phillipson, and Michelle Williams Gamaker. Alumni in art management or curatorial roles include Director of Towner Art Gallery Joe Hill, Observer art critic Laura Cumming, and Hayley Dixon, head of finance and operations at Studio Voltaire. Further distinguished alumni include Goldfrapp singer Alison Goldfrapp, Olympic boxing champion and painter Joe Joyce, and artist Anish Kapoor.

MDXworks

Our employability service, MDXworks will launch you into the world of work from the beginning of your course, with placements, projects and networking opportunities through our 1000+ links with industry and big-name employers in London and globally.

Our dedicated lifetime career support, like our business start-up support programme and funding for entrepreneurs, has been recognized with the following awards:

The top 20 UK universities for business leaders and entrepreneurs – Business Money, 2023 

A top 10 university for producing CEOs – Novuana, 2023

Global network

You’ll study with students from 122 countries who’ll hopefully become part of your global network. And after you graduate, we'll still support you through our alumni network to help you progress in your chosen career.

  1. UK entry
  2. International entry
  3. Interview and portfolio
  4. How to apply

Fees

The fees below are for the 2024/25 academic year:

UK students1

Full-time: £9,250

Part-time: £77 per taught credit

International students2

Full-time students: £16,600

Part-time students: £138 per taught credit

Additional costs

The following course-related costs are included in the fees:

  • A subscription to the Adobe Cloud package
  • All laser-printing and photocopying required for your study (with access to subsidised photographic and large-format printing)
  • Free laptop loans for up to 24 hours
  • Audio-visual equipment available for loan, including digital stills cameras, digital video recorders, digital audio recorders, through the Kit Hub
  • £50 credit per year, to spend in the MDX materials shop in the Grove.

The following course-related costs are not included in the fees, and you may be required to purchase these to complete the course. The costs are approximate and may change due to changes in pricing at the retailer:

  • Art materials (e.g. paints, paper, canvas, SD cards, USB sticks, photographic film, etc.), in addition to the £50 credit that you receive to spend in the MDX materials shop in the Grove. For year one basic materials to meet group assignments are provided. The cost of materials varies widely and depends wholly on your artistic choices – it is possible to spend next to nothing on the production of your work on BA Fine Art.
  • Optional visits to ticketed exhibitions at museums and galleries. Please note that most compulsory visits to exhibitions are either covered by the course or subsidised, with student contributions in the region of £3 per exhibition.
  • Optional subsidised field trips to UK or overseas destinations.

Scholarships and bursaries

To help make uni affordable, we do everything we can to support you including our:

  • MDX Excellence Scholarship offers grants of up to £2,000 per year for UK students
  • Regional or International Merit Awards which reward International students with up to £2,000 towards course fees
  • Our MDX Student Starter Kit to help with up to £1,000 of goods, including a new laptop or iPad.

Find out more about undergraduate funding and all of our scholarships and bursaries.

Fees disclaimers

1. UK fees: The university reserves the right to increase undergraduate tuition fees in line with changes to legislation, regulation and any government guidance or decisions. The tuition fees for part-time UK study are subject to annual review and we reserve the right to increase the fees each academic year by no more than the level of inflation.

2. International fees: Tuition fees are subject to annual review and we reserve the right to increase the fees each academic year by no more than the level of inflation.

Any annual increase in tuition fees as provided for above will be notified to students at the earliest opportunity in advance of the academic year to which any applicable inflationary rise may apply.

Alice Maude-Roxby
Programme Leader BA Fine Art

Alice Maude-Roxby studied Fine Art at Newcastle, and Photography in the class of Dieter Appelt at the Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin. National and international grants and fellowships enabled her to research and make work abroad, including Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Berlin, Leverhulme Trust, Norway, Japan Foundation, Tokyo, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England in the UK. Initially working within a fine art context, her work was included in exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and England & Co in the UK, and various galleries in Germany and Scandinavia. More recently she has focused on curating, photography and writing. She has been involved in an extensive body of work looking at the collaborative processes involved in the recording of performance.

Dr John Timberlake
Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

Dr Timberlake joined Middlesex University in 2007. A practising artist, he has exhibited widely and his work is held in a number of collections in Europe and the US. He gained his Ph.D. in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Dr Loraine Leeson
Senior Lecturer, Art Practice and the Community

Dr Leeson is known for her collaborative and participatory work in East London, including the Docklands Community Poster Project in the 1980's. Her work with young people has been recognised by a Media Trust Inspiring Voices award and Olympic Inspire Mark, while her public artwork The Catch was voted a London 2012 Landmark. Her project Active Energy has received the Best Arts and Green Energy award from Regen SW.

Alberto Duman
Lecturer in Art Practice and the Community

Alberto Duman’s interdisciplinary work is located at the intersection between art and urban spatial practice across diverse media and collaborative partnerships, with particular concerns to social context and the role of art in the cultural production of urban space. He is Artist in Residence at UEL with Music for Masterplanning.

Simon Read
Associate Professor, Fine Art

Simon Read is concerned with environmental change and works with coastal communities to help foster understanding of coastal and estuarine issues. He is also engaged in the management of the liminal intertidal zone. He has built experimental structures to manage tidal flow through saltmarsh, including A Tidal Protection Barrier for Sutton Saltmarsh on the River Deben in Suffolk and Falkenham Saltmarsh Tidal Management Scheme.

Dr Alexandra Kokoli
Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture-Fine Art

Dr Kokoli's interests are situated within feminist art history, theory and practice, particularly the relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis, gender politics of popular visual culture and contemporary feminist movements. She is author of The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (Bloomsbury, 2016) and editor of Feminism Reframed (Cambridge Scholars, 2008) and The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller (1977-2007) (JRP Ringier, 2008).

Keith Piper
Associate Professor in Fine Art

Keith Piper is a member of the Diasporas Research Cluster and the Science Fiction Research Cluster.

Keith Piper’s creative practice exists in response to specific issues, historical relationships and geographical sites. His research driven approach prioritises thematic exploration over an attachment to any particular media. Therefore, his work over the past 25 years has ranged from painting, through photography and installation to a use of digital media, video and computer based interactivity.

As a student at Trent Polytechnic in the early 1980s, Piper was a founder member of the Blk Art Group. Since then he has exhibited work internationally, published writings and taught in institutions in the UK and North America. His recent work has included The Perfect City, a multiscreen video project commissioned by Film London (2007), solo exhibitions in the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2004) and the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (2007). He was also commissioned to produce site specific works for the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of Uncomfortable Truths (2007) and The Black Atlantic for the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2004).

  • Kelvin Okafor

    Fine Art BA graduate

    Kelvin's pencil and charcoal drawings became a huge internet hit after his work was featured on the BBC London news, leading to further coverage across the globe and media appearances in countries including Nigeria, Italy, France and Denmark and most of the UK's national newspapers.

    It was unbelievable. The week before it all happened I was in my studio having an average week, and the next I was on TV and being tweeted about by Tinie Tempah. Before I would hope to sell one piece a month, but since I've sold five. It was an unexpected but amazing boost for my career.

    I've even had feedback from Corinne Bailey Rae to say she likes my portrait of her, and sent Queen Noor of Jordan my drawing of the late King Hussein as a gift, and she responded to say she was delighted. I owe a great deal to the University because all of this stemmed from there.

  • Amy Honour

    Fine Art BA graduate

    The University has everything you need to be successful, some of the best resources and facilities. It sounds obvious but everything is set up to help you do well and to prepare you as an artist for the 'outside world', you just have to take it on and do it. So go to lectures, make tutorials, and push yourself and your peers.

  • Natasha Kiddle

    Fine Art BA graduate

    Natasha works for luxury brand LK Bennett

    Alongside technical teaching and guidance for my craft, the Fine Art degree at Middlesex University taught me a valuable lesson in understanding how to market myself (as an artist, entrepreneur or brand) and products (Art or any other consumable) and drive them towards success. I have used these skills to build a successful career in Luxury Management where my main objective is to drive the business towards financial success. The course has put me in good stead for reaching goals in my business ahead of other managers as I was shown how to devise 'creative' solutions to complex problems.


We’ll carefully manage any future changes to courses, or the support and other services available to you, if these are necessary because of things like changes to government health and safety advice, or any changes to the law.

Any decisions will be taken in line with both external advice and the University’s Regulations which include information on this.

Our priority will always be to maintain academic standards and quality so that your learning outcomes are not affected by any adjustments that we may have to make.

At all times we’ll aim to keep you well informed of how we may need to respond to changing circumstances, and about support that we’ll provide to you.

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Duration: 3 years full-time

Code: W210

Illustration BA Honours

Start: October 2024

Duration: 3 years full-time

Code: W220

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