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:
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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.
This module aims to provide you with models for understanding professional behaviours in Fine Art practice. You will be given insight and understanding of the positionality of the contemporary artist. Interdisciplinary methodologies spanning art theory, history and visual culture will be used to enable you to analyse, debate and discuss the different subject positions and professional roles that have developed in relation to contemporary Fine Art’s production, curation, distribution and mediation.
This module aims to initiate the development of individual studio practice through material, technical and conceptual exploration. You will develop knowledge and skills across a range of forms of research as the basis for creative and critical practice. You will begin with an introductory studio project for all students, emphasising ‘critical thinking through creative making’ and comprising both workshop inductions and lectures. Throughout the module you will be introduced to key debates and ideas in contemporary fine art alongside a series of parallel project-based approaches to gaining experience in different practices.
This module aims to: emphasise strategies for professional practice and employability through in-depth study of contemporary art practices. It will support you in applying knowledge of research, production, distribution and curating in the development of both your own work and personal development planning. Through a weekly programme, you will be exposed to the multiple ways in which contemporary artists are documenting their research and production processes, and disseminating this to various audiences.
In this module you will undergo an intensive development of practice across the module in being challenged to develop a substantial body of individual research-led practice engaging in a wide variety of possible ways of making, thinking and doing. You will be engaging with the key pathways of the programme and potentially leading to named awards (i.e. Fine Art, Critical Practice, Multimedia Practice, Social Practice.) There will be opportunities for public and professional engagement in the latter stages of the module, through forms of social engagement, online dissemination or gallery exhibition.
The module aims to enable you to identify yourself as a particular type of practitioner, your ambitions for the future and strategies to sustain professional practice. Beginning with ‘identifying your ambitions’, the module will use this information to design a programme of work corresponding to the particular needs and desires identified. You will record your professional development via an online journal (usually a publicly accessible blog) through which you collect material relating to your studies, research and developing practice.
This module consolidates the work with professionalism and demonstrates a high level of technical alignment, competence and thinking. During this year the relation between practice and theory is further realised. You are expected to be able to ‘frame’ your work and ideas in a way that is coherent and clear. You will continue to engage in a process of critical reflection on your own work and the work of others. You will be supported to produce an ambitious body of practice disseminated through public exhibition and encompassing a critical portfolio of rigorous and thorough research and commentary on the critical, theoretical and/or historical interests, underpinning the practice.
This module emphasises the reading, engagement with, and writing of theoretical, critical, and creative texts as a practice through which art is produced, alongside other forms of making. You will develop an understanding of the range of different forms of writing open to artists as a means to support a critical and theoretically rich art practice. You will be able to demonstrate a focused and imaginative understanding of the relevance of current/historical discourses to your own practice and interests and relate work in an imaginative, considered and creative way, reflecting on their distinction and unity.
Through committed and sustained studio practice, this module will help you expand your creative practice and technical expertise with particular emphasis on viewer interaction, contemporary sound and video technologies and digital techniques. The central objective of this year is to support the above development and to provide guidance in forming a coherent ‘shape’ to your overall practice. Your development as an artist is supported through a self-initiated, critical research essay investigating an area arising from your practice/or your more general critical, theoretical and/or historical interest.
Your work will bring together skills and interests developed through studio practices and expanded across a variety of socially engaged situations. You will develop an art practice in direct relation to other people through a sustained project of collaboration, social engagement and/or community involvement, the results of which will constitute your degree show. The collaboration could be with other students, groups or organisations active within the community. The development of your artistic practice is supported by a self-initiated, critical research essay investigating an area arising from your practice and/or your more general critical, theoretical and/or historical interests.
More information about this course
See the course specification for more information about typical course content outside of the coronavirus outbreak:
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, 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, artist Anish Kapoor
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.
Steve Mumberson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and a member of committee at the Printmaker Council. He has worked on printmaking collections around the world and has written on printmaking education, its practice and particular printmakers. Steve has won silver medals at the Master Cup and the Gold Panda contest and was awarded a Humorists' Prize at the 5th Red Man International Humour Art Biennale in Beijing. At present his main interests are in digital printmaking and 3D printing as well as combining these with traditional methods to make unconventional prints.
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).
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.
Serena Korda
Fine Art BA graduate
After graduating from Middlesex, Serena held a series of solo shows and held a two year residency at Newcastle University as the 2016-17 Norma Lipman and BALTIC Fellow in Ceramic Sculpture.
I always think fondly of my time at Middlesex where I met so many amazing artists students and staff. Middlesex was an amazing foundation for my career as an artist - it was here that any hierarchy of approach to making was melted away. Performance and collaboration were celebrated and encouraged with large project spaces available allowing us to experiment, make mistakes and be ambitious with our vision.
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 is now Store Manager at the luxury women's fashion 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.
Start: October 2022
Duration: 1 year full-time, + 3 years full-time
Code: See How to apply tab
Start: October 2022, EU/International induction: September 2022
Duration: 3 years full-time
Code: W210
