Join a culturally rich and diverse creative community where learning and teaching extend from the studio to a professional network of leading art professionals and through participation in public exhibitions and events.
Your studies will be a combination of studio practices, theory, critical involvement with culture, society, and artistic practices. As well as developing your critical and creative skills, you will graduate with a range of transferable skills preparing you for a wide range of careers. Many of our graduates have gone on to work as curators, art therapists, researchers, writers, photographers, and many more.
Benefit from the teachings of cutting-edge and multi-disciplinary artists, theorists and curators, including artist Keith Piper, (founder member of the ground breaking BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students), Alexandra Kokoli author of the Feminist Uncanny, artist Ergin Cavusoglu and others. Our outstanding facilities in The Grove, our specialist building for art, design, media and performing arts, are among the best in the country.
You will be given the freedom to explore different types of arts to follow your interests and to shape your own degree. After the first year, you’ll be able to attend specialist seminars leading to one of our distinct pathways:
Year after year our students produce outstanding work and leave the course with an impressive portfolio to launch their career. Take a look at some of the work from last year’s graduates on our Creative Graduates 2022 exhibition site.
*this course is subject to review. We periodically re-evaluate our programmes to make sure the content and teaching stay up to date and relevant. Please check this page regularly for updates.
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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.
Your first year concentrates 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.
In your second year you will diversify and expand your skills, developing a deeper awareness of the critical demands of contemporary art
Your final year of your degree enables you to consolidate and refine your art, developing your studio practice to a professional level.
Alongside developing your vision and skills as an artist, you will also develop a wide range of transferable skills including initiative, self-motivation, resourcefulness, excellent written and verbal communications skills, ability to work both alone and in groups, and the ability to be reflective and constructively self-critical about projects you have initiated.
The module aims to:
This module aims to:
This module aims to:
This module aims to:
The module aims to:
This module aims to:
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.
The module aims to:
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:
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.
More information about this course
See the course specification for more information about course content:
Optional modules are usually available at levels 5 and 6, although optional modules are not offered on every course. Where optional modules are available, you will be asked to make your choice during the previous academic year. If we have insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, or there are staffing changes which affect the teaching, it may not be offered. If an optional module will not run, we will advise you after the module selection period when numbers are confirmed, or at the earliest time that the programme team make the decision not to run the module, and help you choose an alternative module.
Internationally recognised and respected, BA Fine Art is a broad degree that develops your creative and critical abilities and is a route into a rewarding career as a professional artist. 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 allows 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 so they are highly employable in a broad range of careers. Many students will also have undertaken internships or placements in their chosen fields.
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.
Since graduating from in 2009, Kelvin has won numerous awards for his highly detailed drawings which each take more than 100 hours to create. He took the world stage by storm in 2013 and his work has continued to enthral the public and art collectors ever since.
In 2017, he became the first black artist to be permanently exhibited in the House of Commons as part of the Parliamentary Art Collection. His stunning pencil portrait of the late Bernie Grant MP (one of the UK's first Black British MPs) hangs outside the Attlee room in Portcullis House.
More recently, he was welcomed back to Middlesex and gifted one of his famous photo-like pencil portraits, ‘Mia’s interlude’, to the University.
Other notable alumni include artists Hayley Newman, Chris Alton, Benedict Drew, Heather Phillipson, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Serena Korda. Alumni in art management or curatorial roles include Director of Towner Art Gallery Joe Hill, Observer art critic Laura Cumming, and Deputy Director of Focal Point Gallery, Hayley Dixon. Other distinguished alumni include Goldfrapp singer Alison Goldfrapp and artist Anish Kapoor.
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.
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 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 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’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 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 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 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).
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.
Start: October 2023
Duration: 1 year full-time, + 3 years full-time
Code: See How to apply tab
Start: October 2023, EU/International induction: September 2023
Duration: 3 years full-time
Code: W210
Start: September 2023, EU/International induction: September 2023
Duration: 3 years full-time
Code: W220