Many contemporary artists consider essential to their making process, and historians find equally invaluable to their studies.

The five-year MA (Hons) Fine Art (MAFA) degree exemplifies the inter-relations between practice, theory and history that many contemporary artists consider essential to their making process, and historians find equally invaluable to their studies.

The students are uniquely skilled in their ability to look backwards and forwards at the same time: drawing on historical examples to envision and understand their own processes; sometimes to even further them and experiment with historic traditions, which have often fallen out of fashion. Their processes are innately research-led and this is due to the nature of their studies, inhabiting both practical and historical disciplines.

You can find their work on this website.

In addition to their practice-based work, the breadth of dissertation topics produced by the MAFA students is indicative of the wide range of expertise of the teaching and research staff in the subject area, but also the levels of enquiry our students have for their subject. We often see in our MAFA cohort the blending of their own practice into their research for History of Art. This year, we've seen dissertations on a wide range of topics including the following: 

  • Ecological artworks 
  • Divine landscapes and devotional topographies
  • Visual representations of the Slavic forest spirit - the Leshy
  • Hew Locke’s art activism and decolonial interventions
  • Hildegard of Bingen, collective memory and women’s reproductive rights
  • Mingyuan roles, household order, and lay Chan practice in Guan Daosheng’s art
  • Moral ambiguities and marketing strategies in Belle Époque advertisements

Top image: Yuri Aleksanyan, MA (Hons) Fine Art