MA Craft and Material Practices

Arts University Plymouth

MA Craft & Material Practices at Arts University Plymouth is a course that takes craft as a starting point rather than a destination. Steeped in tacit knowledge that is often transmitted through hands-on skills and customs, 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.

Your creative study will bring you into contact with the ideas and professional practices of artisans, artists, designers, materials 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 in hot glass, kiln formed glass, ceramics, 3D clay printing, biomaterials, wood working, small metals, as well as to the digital tools within Fab Lab Plymouth, which is part of the global Fab Lab network focused on digital and distributed fabrication.

Your materials exploration is guided by the interdisciplinary structure of the postgraduate course, where you will share a common series of units with postgraduate 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 which 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.

You will have the opportunity to develop your ideas through placements and funded opportunities for learning by applying your material skills in specific contexts, including your participation in a Research Intensives programme that will provide the means to see craft as a tangible form of creative, technical or material research.