Course Information

Offering Studio

Ideation of objects can be understood to be is a creative process of developing and generating ideas and solutions through the making, experimentation and exploration of ceramic forms. This course explores the contemporary ceramic object, examines how the object responds to and is informed by socioeconomic, political and environmental conditions, and how ceramics can serve as a means for creating community art project. Students will explore and experiment with different ceramic forming techniques and surface finishes in relationship to this conceptual framework.

In this course you will investigate the contributing influence of imaging technologies on the artistic, stylistic and conceptual production of fine art photo works. You will acquire a capacity to formulate and articulate a conceptual foundation for your practice, and to make appropriate decisions as to which mediums and presentation methods best translate your conceptual premise through a photographic practice. Print imaging technology, including photographic and digital processes will be explored to assist you in diversifying your options for fine photo work production. You will develop an understanding of the possibilities offered by photography and its position within contemporary art practice through visual research and experimentation, while continuing to refine your technical skills in order to produce a resolved body of artwork. You will also deepen your analytical thinking and making skills to locate your studio practice within the broader context of fine art. In consultation with your lecturer, you will take responsibility for the determination of your program and will be encouraged to consider appropriate options for your arts practice. This course is a self-directed learning program that establishes appropriate methods with photographic related technologies for developing visual projects. The course is designed to align the process of articulation and application of concepts and ideas to photography with related materials and methods of production. The course will cover health and safety issues in the studio, lab and workshop and its relationship to ontemporary art practice.

Extended Studio Practices explores of the diversity of contemporary painting. In this course you will be encouraged you to develop an individual studio practice that explores materials, processes, technologies, and ideas which contributes to a broader understanding of painting as a discipline and its potential as a hybridised art practice. The course raises a series of provocations including: What painting is (and isn’t)? How painting in an expanded field can be explored through materiality, time, location, the role of documentation and of multi-media through process-based projects. Painting in this context becomes material, media, a process, a medium, an object, a spatial field, a concept or a discourse in and of itself. In will encourage you to think about painting through its own historical trajectories and as an expansive lens whereby it intersects and engages with other disciplines including sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, video and other digital medias.

In this course, you will engage with contemporary art practices that employ gender and text-based practices as points of departure, with specific attention to discourses that generate spaces within and beyond arbitrary cultural norms. It considers the relationships of gender, art, image and text as inter-related discourses embedded within culture, identity, and global histories. With an emphasis in photographic practices, this course engages ideas such as; revised notions of gender within the perspective of art practices, the body and identity, visual literacy and literary ‘visuacy’, image and words, and language and its broader contextual considerations.

In this course you will initiate a body of artwork and related research. Through a series of specific projects. you will define, research, document and present an area of individual material practice. You will be encouraged to develop a personal aesthetic sensitivity in relation to your own artwork. The material knowledge from this research will then be transformed into a series of resolved artworks. you will undertake a semester long research project to produce a research archive as well as a body of ceramic objects that respond to this research. You will research an area of direct interest to you and your ceramic practice. This course will assist in developing your ability to conduct and document research that is integral to the ongoing practice in all creative disciplines.

Notions of ‘landscape’ and ‘space’ continues to be a rich source for artists to draws from as research, concepts, content, motifs, materials and subject matter, through painting practices. In this course you will explore ideas and motifs related to the landscape across a range of ecologies, from the built and natural environments and that relate specifically to art, nature and culture. Through a project-based process, you will be introduced to a range of individual research strategies formed around ideas of space; as real, pictorial, transformative, virtual, illusionary, physical, psychological and the imaginative. You will explore how artists initiate work through a range of starting points, trials and experiments, through studio practice using a variety of media and processes. This course develops your capacities to materialise art across a range of media and materials to broaden the scope of your emerging practice.

This course draws on Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field in which she defines the structural parameters of sculpture, architecture and landscape art, to develop approaches to expanded notions of spatial practices such as installation, the ready-made, performance, conceptualism, site specificity and time-based works. It locates sculptural practice in relation to modernism and through to contemporary practices and encourages students to approach their work in the most expanded way. Students will be encouraged to develop their own responses through a series of guided projects.

This course uses the strategy of collage to create sculptural works from existing objects and materials. It involves deconstructing and reconstructing objects, connecting incongruous forms and creating new relationships between materials. You will be encouraged to collect and recycle your own materials. This workshop aims to give you the skills and hands-on experiencing to enable you to develop work with strong conceptual and sculptural properties whilst giving you the freedom and encouragement to develop your own projects. This will be supported by hands-on sessions exploring sculptural techniques and processes such as casting, joinery and welding.