BA(Honours)Contemporary Crafts - Manchester Metropolitan University

The course offers a programme of study reflecting a broad range of approaches taken by the contemporary artist or designer craftsperson, and is grounded in contemporary culture. Its main focus is the development of original ideas through the process of experiment, exploration and enquiry. The course encourages participants to make connections between a diverse range of materials and processes within the context of society, developing an awareness of the role of the creative practitioner, the intention and purpose that their work fulfils.

Material Culture is, at the broadest level, the study of that which is apparent in the world. This tends to be centred on objects - anything from forks to paintings - but material culture could be used as an approach to consider certain types of behaviour like queuing for a bus! This is because material culture derives from anthropology which, as the study of other cultures, is necessarily broad. On the BA (Hons) degree for Contemporary Crafts, students learn to think about the relationships between objects, philosophies and society and they are inevitably drawn to the consider their own place, and that of their practice, within the world.

Visual Research aims to stimulate the student into being inquisitive and sensitive to the visual world, and to be inventive about the ways in which they can perceive, collate, develop and present ideas and information. These ideas may be concerned with trying things for their own sake or they may relate directly to the material areas of the degree. Visual Research takes many approaches through drawing, collage, printing, painting, photography or digital media, as the programme progresses it becomes very much a personal choice as to how students present their ideas in a visual way.

Karen Shapley

Department of Contemporary Arts MMU Cheshire - opens in a new window