Master of Fine Art (MFA)

Course Overview

The Master of Fine Art (MFA) programme caters for students who wish to develop their professional practice or knowledge within the discipline of Fine Art. Typically this might include teachers, practicing artists, community workers, arts administrators, or recent graduates in Fine Art who wish to further their professional practice. The MFA is designed to respond to students who already have a practice and who are able to readily determine where they are in relation to a field and its histories of practices and ways of working. It is the role of the MFA to work outwards, as it were, towards a context for the students practice. The student focus will be on their development of Art Practice relevant to the CSAD Subjects of: Fine Art; Textiles; Ceramics; Artist Designer Maker; and Illustration.

The learning outcomes are assessed within the modules through a variety of methods including essays, presentations and project work etc, as seen in individual module descriptors. Assessment takes place at strategic points in the academic year to enable and support your continued development. Group critiques and tutorials offer continuous feedback opportunities. Peer and self-assessment is used extensively. Students can exit at Postgraduate Certificate and Postgraduate Diploma levels.

The MA Fine Art programme enables students to enhance their careers as, or to become, established artists leading towards a career, a PhD, or to a Professional Doctorate. Cardiff School of Art and Design offers Professional Doctoral programs in both Art and Design. Our Masters in Fine Art is designed to enable students to achieve the attributes of greater flexibility, adaptability, and individual responsibility and autonomy as professional designers or researchers. The course aims to develop individuality, creativity, self-reliance, initiative, and the ability to perform in rapidly changing environments as well as increasing competence with research skills and methods which will make graduates highly employable as academics and/or researchers, or enable them to develop an active and sustained practice as designers.

The MFA enables graduates, mid-career and professional practitioners from within and outside of the discipline of Fine Art to negotiate and examine strategies of practice whilst being able to create their own hybrids of material and theoretical based practices that can further enhance the discipline. All students receive individual PDP tutorials to support employability and life-long learning. Students will be expected to maintain learning journals evidencing continuous visual documentation that integrates opportunities for self-reflection in order to help them develop as effective and confident learners. At the conclusion of the programme, a very high percentage of MFA graduates establish or continue their professional practice, enabled by the links they have made with design studios or organisations associated with the visual arts and design. Some elect to continue with their Fine Art studies at CSAD by undertaking a PhD.