MRes Art*

Teaching activities emerge from and build upon the heritage of rigorous student-centred art pedagogy within the School of Art at Goldsmiths.

Through tutorials, collective forums, lectures and research methods workshops, you will produce a self-directed body of contemporary art research, supported by textual exposition and proposal writing. 

You will be encouraged to take artistic risks, to challenge established norms of making, and will be supported to be inventive, playful and imaginative with technical processes, contexts and strategies of presentation.

You will learn to critically situate your work in relation to historical and contemporary art research practices and discourses, as well as fashioning and exploring new techniques and insights.

You will learn to write a research proposal, where you acquire research application and PhD proposal writing skills, which will help you translate and articulate your practice for Arts Councils and UKRI funding schemes.

The curriculum is designed to provide access to research terminology used by all the major UK research funding councils and organisations such as Arts Council, AHRC, ESRC, The Wellcome Trust, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust. 

There are non-assessed collaborative workshops run with the MA Creative & Life Writing programme and the Research Knowledge Exchange department at Goldsmiths.

You can study either full-time for one year or part-time over two years. 

The programme is comprised of three interwoven elements:

• Art Research Practice
• Art Research Methods
• Art Research Proposal Writing

Your art research practice is the focus of the programme and it is through this that the other writing components are taught. Therefore all parts of the programme are taught through each other, where testing, feedback and developments are reciprocally rewarding for the practice and written elements.

Studio space is central to the programme, and allocated to all full-time students, where there are no divisions between forms of artistic work. Through making processes in the studios and Art Practice Areas, you will generate work that forms your art research practice. This is tested in Collective Forums. In these forums, you will receive oral feedback from the ‘speakers’ and written feedback from the ‘scribe’, as well as learning to express a series of questions/problems that the work is addressing through engagement with the ‘host’.

Throughout your studies, you will receive continual feedback from tutors and peers across all elements of the programme and through the use of shared facilities. Additionally, you will receive written feedback at key assessment points.

Part-time pathway

Part-time students receive 50% contact time of full-time students over two years. If you choose to take the part-time route, you will not have an allocated studio space but use the shared studio/seminar space for tutorials on top of your own independent studio space outside of Goldsmiths.

Please note: The part-time pathway is not open to international students due to visa regulations.

Amongst others, the following are the types of activities you can expect to participate in during the programme:

One-to-one tutorials

A tutor will provide supervision and oversight of your development from your application proposal through to your final exhibition presentation and projected long-term research project. 

Research Methods Seminars

This series of seminars teaches the histories of art research methods as well as a broad range of paradigms, theories and contexts of research in contemporary art. 

Supervision from student-selected visiting tutors

You will invite a visiting tutor who has specialist expertise in the field of your art research to undertake two supervision meetings with you.

Group tutorials

Scheduled group discussions allow you to build participatory critical skills by offering and receiving feedback from your peers, as well as co-producing the ambition and energy of the conversation in a timed, but open-structure. 

Collective Forums

An elaboration of the traditional art school group critique. In collective forums, you will either install an artwork or a piece of writing (through forms of performance, publishing or enactment). There are a number of roles, ‘the speakers’, ‘the host’, ‘the presenter’ and ‘the scribe’. In each session, every student is allocated to a role, where you learn to develop the particular skillset necessary to it. 

Studios

Studio space is the central axis of the programme. They are open seven days a week and encourage you to work and learn individually and collectively as a group.