Craft and Material Practices (Taught)

A practice-led, materials-focused MA that takes craft as a starting point rather than a destination. Develop a future-oriented professional practice through material-led research processes, supported by specialist studios, digital fabrication in Fab Lab South West, and an interdisciplinary postgraduate structure.

MA Craft & Material Practices is a course that takes craft as a starting point rather than a destination. Steeped in tacit knowledge often transmitted through hands-on skills and heritage traditions, you will be guided in material-led research processes in clay, glass, wood, biomaterials, metals, fibre or other materials that lead to personal discovery and future-oriented, contemporary professional practice.

Through instruction that takes place in our spacious, highly resourced material labs, workshops and studios, you will be encouraged to expand your knowledge of materials and traditional methods of making into new territories of practice open to alternative materials, conceptual frameworks and cross-sector understanding of how materially led innovation is shaping the world.

At a glance

• Award: MA Craft & Material Practices

• Approach: practice-led, materials-focused curriculum

• Postgraduate structure: shared units with MA students in other disciplines (critiques, seminars, research intensives, external site visits and lectures)

Materials, studios and resources

Your creative study will bring you into contact with the ideas and professional practices of artisans, artists, designers, material researchers, product designers, urban planners, architects and others who are working directly with the behaviour and potential of materials in both expressive and applied design.

You will have access to specialist studios and resources including:

• Hot glass

• Kiln-formed glass

• Ceramics

• 3D clay-printing

• Biomaterials

• Wood-working

• Small metals

• Fab Lab South West digital tools (open-source, digital and distributed fabrication)

Interdisciplinary postgraduate structure

Your materials exploration in craft is guided by the interdisciplinary structure of the postgraduate course. You will share a common series of units with MA students in other disciplines for critiques, seminars, research intensives, external site visits and lectures.

Specialist instruction in craft and other material practices is taught through smaller seminars where you will concentrate on contemporary ideas and models of practice.

Contemporary ideas, debates and models of practice

You will broaden your understanding of craft to see its relationship to current debates in art theory, design-thinking, materials science and engineering, social or community-based making, climate change, and sustainability.

Why choose this course?

• Deepen your knowledge and experience of your craft in a practice-led, materials-focused curriculum that provides unique opportunities for personal and professional development.

• Discover new and emerging methods of making within a vast, purpose-built studio building that unites material exploration in ceramics, glass, wood, metals and biomaterials with state-of-the-art digital fabrication.

• Explore the cultural and community-based traditions of craft through a contemporary and critical lens, aligning your practice to relevant theories, research methods and professional opportunities for exhibition.

Careers and future opportunities

Career opportunities include: Designers, Makers, Craftspeople, Artisans, Craft Entrepreneurs, Materials Specialists, Artists and Crafts Educators.

Course Modules

The comprehensive Masters structure, which is shared across our specialist subjects, enables our postgraduate students to focus on creative strategies and processes through three sequential units which support you in investigating, testing and developing your ideas. The core tuition focuses on training, research methodology, critical thinking, design, practice-led research methods and professional and conceptual frameworks. All of our programmes have access to outstanding workshop facilities in the university.

A unique component of our postgraduate curriculum is a programme of Research Intensives which invites all MA students to participate in short format, deep learning sessions in areas of creative expertise led by the university’s research-active staff and external specialists. These Research Intensives enrich subject-specific study with adjacent practices, cultural theories, and creative methodologies that will challenge historical assumptions of your subject and inspire innovative, cross-disciplinary approaches, giving you the opportunity to lead your discipline with original insights.

You will be supported in your MA study by a Subject Tutor who is a specialist in your chosen discipline to provide a consistent touchstone for the critical development and formal progression of your creative or theoretical work. In addition to your Subject Tutor, you will have ongoing tutorials, critiques, and discipline-specific seminars taught by other members of the postgraduate faculty who lead the curriculum units.

By combining learning units with specialist assignments and personal project proposals, you will be able to achieve depth and specialisation within your subject area, while at the same time develop a critical methodology through techniques that can be applied across the commercial, social and public sectors.

All students are asked to submit an initial statement on application to the course. This sets out your ideas for the MA course you have selected. Creative practice is about change and development, and this statement will form the starting point for a dialogue about your work and your study journey.