Overview
Unravelling our complex relationship with the material world
Key details
- 180 credits
- 1 year / 45 week programme
- Full-time study
School or Centre
Location
- Battersea
Next open event
- 1 Feb 2025
- Visit Open Day
Round 1 application deadline
- 13 Jan 2025
Develop your creativity through critical and interdisciplinary making.
- Develop your creative jewellery and metal practice within the material- and research-led processes of Applied Art.
- Advance your creativity and critical thinking with a wide range of insights from arts and design practitioners, theorists and historians.
- Follow in the footsteps of our RCA jewellery alumni who work internationally in fine art, applied art, design and fashion.
Jewellery offers us the opportunity to understand our relationship with the things that surround us. Metal makes up more than 80% of the periodic table, offering limitless potential for innovation in material possibility. Studying this programme, you’ll explore the intersections of the social, technological, art and science.
Our MA Jewellery and Metal uniquely provides academic expertise across art, design, and fine art within a world-leading school of the arts, fostering creativity and experimental making. We merge art and design, the material and immaterial, and the digital and analogue.
Develop your creative identity
This jewellery and metal programme will challenge you to see this discipline from a fresh perspective. You’ll benefit from our research-led approach which blends applied art philosophy and ideas from science. Your learning will be self-directed and self-reflective, critical in nature and thoroughly contextualised in disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge.
By the end of the course, you will have fostered new methodologies and ways of positioning your practice supported by access to digital and traditional methods. Our alumni have been nominated for prestigious awards such as the Turner Prize and secured roles in leading design companies across the globe.
Catch the replays from our latest online Open Day.
Gallery
Staff
Facilities
The School of Arts & Humanities is located across our Battersea and Kensington sites.
View all facilitiesAll full-time students on fine or applied arts programmes are provided with studios or workspace, and access to specialist workshops. There are a number of bookable seminar and project spaces across the site available to all Arts & Humanities students.
Our alumni
Our alumni form an international network of creative individuals who have shaped and continue to shape the world. Click on each name to find out more.
Where will the RCA take you?Alumni stories
More details on what you'll study.
Find out what you'll cover in this programme.
What you'll cover
Programme structure
Term 1
Interrogating Your Practice and Deconstructing Assumptions (45 credits)
Interrogating Your Practice and Deconstructing Assumptions, focuses on developing analytical tools for deconstructing and critiquing your own practice and previous methods/approaches as well as providing new contexts and directions for your work. Emphasis is placed on inviting new thoughts and progressive ideas through which to develop a jewellery, an object, or metal practice. The development of personal and investigative research methods are key, and are developed and discussed throughout the term.
Term 2
Developing Your Voice and Situating a Practice (30 credits)
Developing Methodologies focuses on developing new techniques, processes, lines of enquiry through a material-led, material-transformational practice as well as setting forth your suitable career context where you are asked to frame their practice within a chosen professional context within art and design. Research developments and lines of enquiry formulated in unit 1 will act as a background for the production of a body of work.
Urgency of the Arts – School-wide 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.
Terms 1&2
AcrossRCA – College-wide unit (30 units)
Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA. This unit aims to support you to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing you together to work collaboratively in cross-programme interdisciplinary teams. In your team you will develop a self-initiated themed project, informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to collectively use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action, and help demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.
Term 3
Independent Research Project (60 credits)
The Independent Research Project offers a point of synthesis through public exhibition, critical reflection and the production of a Print Ready Portfolio. Contracted and visiting staff from the programme support you to acquire advanced understanding of practice-led methodologies, critical reflection, production and presentation. Here, the IP supports you with the specific conceptual and material demands of exhibiting and sharing their work and uses this to prepare you for the diverse professional practices of contemporary art and design.
This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.
AcrossRCA
AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.
Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.
Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:
- make connections across disciplines
- think critically about your creative practice
- develop creative networks within and beyond the College
- generate innovative responses to complex problems
- reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts
AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.
Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.
Requirements
What you need to know before you apply
Candidates are selected entirely on merit and applications are welcomed from all over the world. The selection process considers creativity, imagination and innovation as demonstrated in your portfolio, as well as your potential to benefit from the programme and to achieve high MA standards overall.
We seek to recruit students who are talented, enthusiastic, energetic, professionally minded, with an open and critical approach to design and making. You must possess a good undergraduate degree (or non-UK equivalent qualification) in metalwork, jewellery or a related subject, such as textiles, sculpture, architecture and industrial design. Your application should be supported by good, preferably academic, references and you should possess a range of practical skills. Equivalent professional experience or apprenticeships are also taken into account.
Applications may be considered from candidates without formal training and/or qualifications in other subjects, but you must clearly demonstrate an understanding of the subject area and potential to bring expertise and knowledge from another discipline that would contribute to the Jewellery & Metal group dynamic.
What's needed from you
Portfolio requirements
Jewellery & Metal is a dynamic programme which seeks to unpick the interactions of people and the material world. With this in mind, we would like to see your subjective analysis of the world around you within the practice you create. Highlight your particular interests and visions. We want to see what makes your practice unique and where the innovation lies within it. This can be material innovation, conceptual innovation, narrative innovation etc. We are keen to see portfolios from a range of backgrounds and our programme contains students from fine art, applied art and design disciplines.
Please submit up to five works or projects, showing three images for each, totalling a maximum of 15 images. Up to three short films are also suitable for submission within your portfolio. It is important that the work is clearly visible and the focus is on your outcomes/objects.
Please do not provide designed portfolio pages which distract or overwhelm the practice; do not highlight craft process unless it is of particularly innovative or experimental.
Personal statement
Please provide a 300-word written personal statement that addresses the following points:
- Introduce yourself, your interests and your motivations for applying to the Royal College of Art, and to this programme in particular.
- Briefly summarise any educational background and professional experience to date that will support your application.
- Tell us what you want to do in the future.
Video requirements
We ask that you upload a two-minute video recorded on your phone or laptop, speaking to us directly. High production qualities are not needed. We will review the work in your portfolio, so keep your video simple.
This video is your opportunity to tell us who you are as a creative individual. Tell us what drives your creative ambitions; what are your particular interests and how do these influence your practice. Please also take this opportunity to explain why you think Jewellery & Metal is the right programme for you to develop your practice, identity and ideas/philosophy. Self-direction is a key aspect of your learning within an MA programme at the RCA: please explain how you organise and coordinate your own practice.
Take this opportunity to discuss a specific project from your portfolio. Tell us what motivated the project and how you developed it from an early stage through to a final outcome. Explain how the project was successful and where it was not successful, and what did you learn from the process – we believe that honest critique of your own practice is essential to self-directed study and is important to showcase this within this video.
English-language requirements
If you are not a national of a majority English-speaking country you will need the equivalent of an IELTS Academic or UKVI score of 6.5 with a 6.0 in the Test of Written English (TWE) and at least 5.5 in other skills. Students achieving a grade of at least 6.0, with a grade of 5.5 in the Test of Written English, may be eligible to take the College’s English for Academic Purposes course to enable them to reach the required standard.
You are exempt from this requirement if you have received a 2.1 degree or above from a university in a majority English-speaking nation within the last five years.
If you need a Student Visa to study at the RCA, you will also need to meet the Home Office’s minimum requirements for entry clearance.
Fees & funding
For this programme
Fees for new students
Fees for September 2025 entry on this programme are outlined below. From 2021 onward, EU students are classified as Overseas for tuition fee purposes.
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Overseas and EU
Deposit
New entrants to the College will be required to pay a non-refundable deposit in order to secure their place. This will be offset against the tuition fees.
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Overseas and EU
Progression discount
For alumni and students who have completed an RCA Graduate Diploma and progress onto an RCA Master's programme – MA, MA/MSc, MFA, MDes, MArch, MEd or MRes – within 10 years, a progression discount of £1,000 is available.
* Total cost is based on the assumption that the programme is completed in the timeframe stated in the programme details. Additional study time may incur additional charges.
Scholarships
Scholarships
The RCA scholarship programme is growing, with hundreds of financial awards planned for the 2025/6 academic year.
For more information and examples of financial awards offered in 2024/25, visit the Scholarships & awards webpage.
You must hold an offer to study on an RCA programme in order to make a scholarship application in Spring 2025. A selection of RCA merit scholarships will also be awarded with programme offers.
We strongly recommend that you apply for your programme as early as possible to stand the best chance of receiving a scholarship. You do not apply directly for individual awards; instead, you will be invited to apply once you have received an offer.
More information
Additional fees
In addition to your programme fees, please be aware that you may incur other additional costs associated with your study during your time at RCA. Additional costs can include purchases and services (without limitation): costs related to the purchase of books, paints, textiles, wood, metal, plastics and/or other materials in connection with your programme, services related to the use of printing and photocopying, lasercutting, 3D printing and CNC. Costs related to attending compulsory field trips, joining student and sport societies, and your Convocation (graduation) ceremony.
If you wish to find out more about what type of additional costs you may incur while studying on your programme, please contact the Head of your Programme to discuss or ask at an online or in person Open Day.
We provide the RCASHOP online, and at our Kensington and Battersea Campuses – this is open to students and staff of the Royal College of Art only to provide paid for materials to support your studies.
We also provide support to our students who require financial assistance whilst studying, including a dedicated Materials Fund.
External funding
There are many funding sources, with some students securing scholarships and others saving money from working. It is impossible to list all the potential funding sources; however, the following information could be useful.
Payments
Tuition fees are due on the first day of the academic year and students are sent an invoice prior to beginning their studies. Payments can be made in advance, on registration or in two instalments.
Start your application
Change your life and be here in 2025. Applications now open.
The Royal College of Art welcomes applicants from all over the world.
Before you begin
Make sure you've read and understood the entrance requirements and key dates
More information about eligibility and key datesCheck you have all the information you need to apply.
Read our application process guideConsider attending an Open Day, or one of our portfolio or application advice sessions
See upcoming sessionsPlease note, all applications must be submitted by 12 noon on the given deadline.
Ask a question
Get in touch if you’d like to find out more or have any questions.
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