Curious about studying Fine Art - BA (Hons)at Birmingham City University? We've gathered all the key details—entry requirements, modules, fees, and more. Hear from real students by checking out reviews, or take the next step by booking an open day to explore it for yourself.
Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) - BA (Hons)
Margaret Street
Full Time
Sep 2027
3 Year
Through the skilful manipulation of materials, processes, and ideas, you, as an artist, will be able to offer creative insights that shape who you are and how you exist in the world around you. These are valuable skills in the fast-changing and interconnected web of ecological, political, socio-economic, and philosophical contexts. The BA (Hons) Fine Art course will help you embrace important traditional making skills such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, digital media, and performance, while also encouraging you to fuse these with new developments in creative practice. This will be framed within a professional working context to improve your employability. This hybrid approach, along with discipline-specific studios and specialist workshops, will equip you to navigate the evolving landscape of the Creative Industries into the future.
What's covered in this course?The course is based on four key principles: Making Skills, Making Public, Making Communities, and Making a Living. - Making Skills will be developed through purpose-built studio spaces, allowing you to explore materials and processes in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, digital media, and performance. You’ll acquire and apply technical skills in workshops and through collaboration with fabricators from across Birmingham and beyond. These skills will become the foundation for you to test, interrogate, and transform your art practice both conceptually and aesthetically. - Making Public will encourage you to explore art practice in the public realm. This includes expanded ideas of exhibiting and sharing your outcomes in ways that generate participation with broad audiences. You’ll benefit from live projects and our close links with high-profile establishments, including Eastside Projects, Grand Union, Ikon Gallery, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. These opportunities will help you develop your thinking about the process of making your work public. - Making with Communities will ask you to consider ways to build and sustain meaningful relationships between your art practice and society. You will form Communities of Practice through studio groups and engage with local, national, and international organisations, gaining cultural and global perspectives and experiences. This valuable experience will help you define the future direction of your practice. - Making a Living will focus on your personal development and the various ways you can build and grow a successful creative career. You’ll establish a professional context for your work by gaining a situated knowledge of the art sector. The advancement of the digital world has provided artists with numerous opportunities to thrive in a creative environment.
Professional Placement YearThis course offers an optional professional placement year. This allows you to spend a whole year with an employer, following successful completion of your second year, and is a great way to find out more about your chosen career. Some students even return to the same employers after completing their studies. If you choose to pursue a placement year, you will need to find a suitable placement to complement your chosen area of study. You will be able to draw on the University’s extensive network of local, regional, and national employers, and the support of our Careers teams. If you are able to secure a placement, you can request to be transferred to the placement version of the course. Please note that fees are payable during your placement year, equivalent to 20% of the total full-time course fee for that year.
Acting as a bridge between your prior study and your development on the course, Making Studio asks you to respond to a series of short projects designed to encourage a thoughtful and experimental approach to art making. Each project is designed to help broaden your understanding of art, its modes of production and how it critically operates within the world. You will engage with a wide range of research, materials, methods and processes as well as being introduced to important contemporary and historical ideas and contexts. The studio plays a pivotal role in your development, working as a flexible, fluid and evolving site for art making, sharing and thinking: A space to make work, build communities and allow creative working relationships to form. The module is delivered through lectures, practical workshops, seminars and tutorials. An analytical and reflective account of all projects will be documented in individual process books.
At each level of the course you will think about making a living . At the heart of this will be the development of a personal portfolio of knowledge and skills that you will start at the first year of the course at Level Four and continue throughout. In this module you will begin to think about the way that other practitioners make a living, develop careers and sustain their practices through the application of their skills. You will consider the wider context for your practice through individual research and develop new skills that will underpin your development on the course and beyond. You will be inducted into a number of workshops developing important practical skills in woodwork, metal, printmaking or textiles processes for example. Alongside this you will develop technical skills that will support you in building your own website which will act as an online portfolio documenting your own unique set of skills and the development of your specific practice.
In Making Meaning you will build your own individual project brief. You will be guided through this process with the introduction of three key elements or building blocks, which consist of; a central interest or theme, an identified method and community. Having done so, you will undertake; research, material experimentation and critically reflect on and resolve outcomes. The research and reflection will underpin the writing of an essay that contextualises your work in relation to contemporary and historical art practices. An analytical and reflective account of this project journey will be documented.
Making Public explores the relationship between art and audience. You will investigate contemporary modes of dissemination, strategies of engagement and forms of communication. You will have the opportunity to; exhibit, broadcast, publish and perform, making your individual practice public. Working with your community of peers, you will organise public facing exhibitions, interventions, publications and/or live events to test your ideas. You will develop and produce external facing platforms and outputs that engage audiences and interrogate the notion of public production. Throughout this activity, you will develop essential professional skills. You will research the various roles that artists assume in making work public; the artist as curator, artist as exhibition coordinator, artist as marketing strategist, artist as technician and artist as producer. Through activating your practice and engaging audiences, you will gain an understanding of a range of professional contexts that exist in the expanding field of contemporary fine art. You will learn strategies to activate physical and virtual spaces, working within the University and the city. Working together on and off site, you will make your work visible in an ethical, inclusive and sustainable way.
This module introduces you to practice based research and the notion of practice as a research activity which supports you in developing your individual practice. You will identify key ideas that frame your work and consider how these ideas inform the materials you work with, contexts you work within and the decisions you make in the studio and workshops. You will develop your own research informed output which you will work with peers to then publish to make public.
This module encourages you to consider ways of sustaining meaningful relationships between art practice and society in understanding the value and potentials of making a living by working with communities. Through building networks with diverse communities to create relationships with the city and the people that live here you will explore what values can be fostered by working with others in understanding the expanded role of the artist culturally. You will consider the meaning of your work and its potential impact both within the field of contemporary art and in its wider economic and social context in developing an outcome, project or initiative that has a shared goal for mutual gain.
This module expands your understanding of the relationship of theory and practice. Through this module you will be introduced to a number of key themes, each dealing with a different research topic and practical consideration aligned with studios and workshops as you engage with these as sites and communities of making. In response to these key themes you will explore what it means to take different theoretical ideas through various material, technical and conceptual processes in the development of a research-informed body of work.
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