Sculpture

Term 1

Sites and Situations (45 credits)

Within this orientation unit you will be provided with the practical and theoretical tools of the programme. Teaching and learning happens within your studio time and workshop time, with regular project space presentations of work, and in group sessions, personal tutorials, critiques, and panel talks. Our lecture series is designed to expand your understanding and knowledge of the creative ecology begins in early in the unit. Sites and Situations culminates in ‘festus’ a collaborative dialogical off-site making, festival of ideas. In Sites and Situations you are supported to identify the intention of your practice, its context and relation to site and context. The unit embeds our central notion of thinking through making and helps you position your work within the current dialogues and debates of contemporary art.

You'll also take AcrossRCA (15 credits), which supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

Term 2

The Expanded Field (30 credits)

This unit encourages the development of your individual, innovative studio practice, and asks you to consider your practice within the wider matrix of professional and peer relationships, contextual and intellectual positions. Teaching inputs in The Expanded Field include our lecture series, which is designed to expand your understanding and knowledge of the creative ecology. The Expanded Field supports you in identifying the future direction of your practice, its relation to materiality/immateriality, and its potentials for dissemination across various platforms. You will be supported in your learning through individual and group tutorials, the lecture series, workshops and group sessions.

Urgency of the Arts (School Unit) (15 credits)

In term 2, School of Arts & Humanities Master’s students will participate in a School-wide unit called "The Urgency of the Arts." In this unit we ask how arts and humanities research and practice can engage with our current socio-political climate, and how might it shape, be necessary and essential in contemporary cultural debates.

The unit introduces you to a diverse range of perspectives, approaches and methods relevant to contemporary practice and thought in the arts and humanities. The delivery, predominantly based on workshops and featuring specialist presentations by leading artists, aims to assist you in recognising, questioning, expanding, and reevaluating your own artistic practices and disciplinary assumptions. Through interactions with staff and students from across the School, as well as through a variety of methodological approaches, you will develop an understanding of the contemporary concerns that shape and influence artistic practice. You will be encouraged to reflect on these as a means to articulate the potential of your own work within the context of broad cultural landscapes and urgent cultural debates.

You'll also take the Core Skills unit (15 credits), which supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career.

Term 3

Independent Research Project (60 credits)

The 60-credit Independent Research Project (IRP) is an opportunity to build a body of work that addresses the key ambitions of your research and practice. You will work towards presenting a work or works in the IRP Public Exhibition, which enables you to explore how you can activate your work in a public context, experiment with the most appropriate forms of realising your ideas and gain critical feedback from a group of external arts professionals. The IRP Public Exhibition takes place as part of the unit, and is followed by a period of reflection and further development, which emphasises dissemination of your work over dematerialised platforms, planning for continued practice and research post-graduation.

You will be supported through individual and group tutorials and one-to-one technical support, alongside a series of programme specific and School-wide professional practice and alumni lectures. You will be supported in understanding the possibilities, complexities and impacts of your own work. You will be encouraged to contextualise your work within broad cultural landscapes to recognise and emphasise its potential and the complex ways in which your work may be received and understood. The production of your Portfolio of Practice and its delivery in the Presentation of Practice concludes the IRP.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.

The RCA Sculpture programme is supported by external partners including British Airways, BuildHollywood, Chanel, Colab Sculpture Garden/Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Gilbert Bayes Foundation, Harlow New Town Sculpture Residency, Koko Foundation, Kenneth Armitage Foundation and Prussia Cove.