Our new MA Art & Material Histories, investigates Art Histories through the lens of materials and has a distinctive focus on the links between material, critical and historical enquiry.

Building on the success of our Art Histories teaching programmes for postgraduate Fine Art, Historic Carving and Conservation, this course can be taken as full-time in one year, or over two years, on a part-time basis.

LECTURES, TUTORIALS AND HANDS-ON WORKSHOPS

You will engage in learning through taught lectures, seminars, group and individual tutorials, hands-on workshops, reading groups and study visits and will consider and scrutinise the use of materials in a range of historical and contemporary artworks and material objects. With a focus on critical thinking around the ‘material turn’ and how the material and ‘immaterial’ world of objects, things, and the stuff they are made from, can relate to philosophical, theoretical, technological, social, and political contexts, you will be encouraged to interrogate key ideas and themes through case studies of objects, artworks and museum collections.

RESEARCH

In addition, you will undertake your own area of research based on your research proposal, evolving working strategies to include primary research such as testing material properties, interviewing artists and craft specialists, curating displays of work and directly analysing material artefacts alongside other research approaches.

The course culminates in the presentation of your research in both a written (dissertation) and visual or alternative presentation form such as a curated exhibition, symposia, publication, short documentary or podcast.

The MA Art & Material Histories is validated by our partner institution Ravensbourne University London.