Textiles MA

University for the Creative Arts

Course overview:

MA Textiles, based at UCA Farnham, is built around developing your individual research into textile art, culture, craft and design and will enable you to combine previous experience of textiles practice with a personal project.

You’ll be encouraged and supported through the process of exploration, transformation through to resolution. Challenging your own conventions, you’ll innovate with materials, processes, techniques and ideas and emerge with a renewed sense of personal vision.

You'll benefit from our links with established artists and designers drawn from a UK and international cohort. Our team comprises eminent professors, visiting scholars, academics and associate lecturers, experienced practitioners, designer-makers, artists and researchers, who work in industry, produce commissions and who regularly exhibit and are published internationally.

The course programme includes opportunities for live working projects with established galleries. The content of lectures and seminars focuses on professional practice, including high profile guest speakers from art, craft, industry and design practices.

We curate our own Textile Collection, which provides our students with an enviable on-site archive of historical and contemporary material objects to study. Also located on our Farnham campus is the internationally renowned Crafts Study Centre, UCA’s purpose-built museum, research centre and gallery dedicated to crafts. We have a long list of alumni who set up as designer-makers and practice as textile artists and many work in education as academics and researchers.

Facilities:

As well as dedicated studio spaces we have - three, 9m long screen-printing tables; individual dyeing labs; materials exploration area; Indigo vat and rust dyeing space; chemical mixing rooms and finishing areas with industrial steamers, baking cabinet and heat presses; computerised and George Wood Dobby looms, Countermarch and table looms; industrial cone and skein winders and frames for finishing woven textiles; well stocked cloth and yarn shops; access to specialist facilities across the School of Craft and Design.

Careers:

Our course will equip you with a host of valuable and transferable skills. Upon successful completion, you may decide to become self-employed, or forge a career within the craft and design industries. These offer a variety of career opportunities, including:

• Freelance design professionals
• Self-employed designer-makers
• Textile designers
• Public art practitioners
• Textile conservationists and curators
• Arts educators and teachers
• Textile stylists
• Fashion buyers and retailers
• Gallery directors.