School

of Fine Art

2014 / 15

The School of Fine Art encourages

strong collaborations between
the four art programmes, fostering
research initiatives in the field and
envisioning new directions, particularly
in moving image and performance.
The RCA, with its broad range of
disciplines and unique workshops,
is perfectly suited for those interested
in sharing knowledge and hands-on
skills across disciplines.

School of Fine Art

The School of Fine Art comprises four
programmes that are defined by subject:
Painting, Photography, Printmaking and
Sculpture, as well as two new routes: Moving
Image and Performance. Each programme
aims to engage with the specific discourse
of the discipline its practices, histories
and theories; proposes an in-depth study as
well as an ongoing questioning of its defining
boundaries; and aims to facilitate crossdisciplinary practices and experimentation.

The postgraduate level and status of the
RCA in art and design education means the
College is able to attract highly talented
students from around the globe, from diverse
backgrounds with a broad range of ideas,
opinions, ambitions and skills. This plurality
is welcomed across the College and is fully
reflected in the School of Fine Art.

The School has an overarching role,
encouraging and enabling students to
engage with issues and practices that run
across fine art. It convenes talks by artists,
critics and cultural producers, providing an
exciting climate of cross-disciplinary debate
and information on contemporary cultural
themes and issues. The School of Fine Art
also includes the Moving Image Studio, which
provides academic and production support
for students within the four programmes and
those on the Moving Image and Performance

Routes. The Drawing Studio offers Collegewide workshops and lectures. Fine Art visiting
professors and tutors reach out to students
in all Fine Art programmes, and have recently
included internationally acclaimed and
renowned artists and theoreticians such as
Yinka Shonibare, Joan Jonas and Alexander
Garca Dttmann. A newly established
School-wide lecture series addresses modes
of contemporary artistic production.
Staff
Programme staff consist of highly regarded
practitioners who ensure that practical
application is relevant and who are
academically qualified to provide a critical
context for the discipline. For further
information on staff, including research
interests, exhibitions and publications,
please visit rca.ac.uk/staff
Applications are welcomed from
Graduates with a good BA degree in fine
art or a related subject recent applicants
have backgrounds in printmaking, painting,
sculpture, photo media, conservation,
illustration, design, textiles, architecture and
interactive arts.
Those able to demonstrate an original and
critical approach to their work, as well as an
ability to engage with current theories of art

and culture, to question received modes of

production and frameworks, and metabolise
academic, social and philosophical encounters.

For College-wide and programme-specific
requirements, please see
rca.ac.uk/entrance-requirements
Alumni
The Royal College of Art is rightly proud of its
graduates achievements. Alumni from the
RCA form part of an international network
of creative individuals who have shaped and
continue to shape the culture surrounding all
of us from the landscape of our cities to
the furniture and appliances in our homes, and
from the clothes we wear and the films we
watch to the work we experience in galleries.

Well-known Fine Art include:
Frank Auerbach, Christiane Baumgartner,
Peter Blake, Victor Burgin, Jake Chapman,
Tony Cragg, Dexter Dalwood, Adam Dant,
Richard Deacon, Tracey Emin, Ori Gersht,
Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney,
Tom Hunter, Idris Khan, Henry Moore,
Tim Noble, Chris Ofili, Marilne Oliver,
Chris Orr, Bridget Riley, Hannah Starkey,
Gavin Turk, Nick Waplington, Richard
Wentworth, Carey Young.

Painting Drive (detail), Max Ruf, Oil on linen, 2013

Painting

Photography

Led by Professor David Rayson, the Painting programme is worldrenowed in research and practice, with a commitment to broadening
the understanding of our discipline in all its forms. Paint is a fluid
material and ideas surrounding what painting is, has been and can be
are being continually reflected upon, and actively explored.

Through the many learning and teaching experiences the programme offers, students and staff rigorously, critically and
supportively engage in personal tutorials, group seminars and presentations. These discussions and critiques take place in the Painting
studios, across the College, in galleries and other partner institutions,
and during visits to major exhibitions both in this country and abroad.

On graduation a selection of students are awarded studio residences,
which the College supports through a mentoring scheme.

Our students are here to reflect upon and play out what kind of
artists they want to be what their personal agendas are and this
becomes a sustainable and meaningful practice on graduation. With
each new year group the dynamic of the studios and the conversations
around painting shift and broaden in their agendas and processes.

A walk through the Sackler Building in Battersea is a journey
through all the possibilities of thinking and making, where artists work
through fleeting successes, essential wrong moves and hard-won
moments of elation.

Led by Professor Olivier Richon, the Photography programme at the

RCA aims to provide a critical and educational environment in which
students can develop as artists with photography at the core of their
practice. Our approach to photography relates to practices and
theories of contemporary art, rather than to media and communication
programmes. We have a fluid approach to image making. Whether
still or moving, analogue or digital, the photographic image is for us a
visual form that aims to be thoughtful as well as playful: an allegorical
and thoroughly visual form.

The programme understands photography as a medium with
no fixed identity. This disregard for a fixed essence is photographys
strength: no aesthetic purity but a multiplicity of rhetorical forms
used for the creation of fact, fiction and fantasy.

Equally the boundary between the still and the moving image is
now fluid and porous, enabling new forms of image making to be created.
We therefore also welcome applicants who work with film, video and
installation.

An informed practice of photography acknowledges the heterogeneous traditions of fine art and visual culture. It also engages with
practices of reading and writing about the image. Here, theory and
practice inform each other and this dialogue characterises committed
study at postgraduate level.

The Photography programme occupies new, purpose-built studio
space at the RCAs Battersea campus, alongside the three other
School of Fine Art programmes.

painting@rca.ac.uk
rca.ac.uk/painting

photography@rca.ac.uk
rca.ac.uk/photography

Photography Passion Flower (detail), Claire Bottomley, C-type print, 2013

Printmaking Albatross (installation view), Catriona Leahy, 2013

Printmaking

Sculpture

Led by artist Professor Jo Stockham, the Printmaking programme

prides itself on the diversity of its student intake and its commitment
to supporting each student in the search for a visual language
appropriate to their interests and desires. We offer two-year, full-time
or three-year, part-time study in the use and abuse of print within
fine art practices.

Purpose-built workshops at the Battersea campus offer internationally renowned facilities covering all the major print mediums,
including relief and intaglio, screen-printing, lithography and large-format
digital printing and scanning. Printmaking students receive inductions
into most print processes from skilled specialist technical instructors.
Many create multiples, artists books, site-specific work, moving image
and performances that frequently make use of archives, appropriation
and the rich histories of printed matter which encompass both text
and image.

Each student develops their individual work alongside a critical
discourse fostered by a diverse team of practising artists, critics and
writers and centred around the ever-shifting nature of images, their
distribution and production. The seminar programme, gallery visits,
visiting lecturers and the wider context of the School of Fine Art, the
RCA as a whole and the diversity of London as a city all contribute to
the experience of study.

Students from the programme benefit from many opportunities
for extending their practice, including teaching placements, publishing
projects, external and College-based exhibitions, overseas travel
and international exchanges. An annual publishing project
and a programme-specific publication equip all students with an
understanding of editioning and book production.

The Sculpture programme, led by Jordan Baseman, enjoys a long

and successful history. The RCA played a major role in the birth of the
modern school of British sculpture in the 1920s: it was at the RCA that
Henry Moore first developed his working confidence. A spatial art,
sculpture is intensely practical, yet essentially philosophical.

As a discipline, it has always been closely associated with
architecture and public space, with ritual and the ceremonial, and has
involved itself in the discourse of form-making. As social, political and
economic circumstances have changed over time, so has the debate.

The Sculpture programme offers associations with a broad
constituency of artists, architects, designers and thinkers across the
RCA as well as engagement with historical and contemporary means
of production across different cultures. Along with a dedicated studio
space, each student has access to College-wide workshop facilities,
including the RCAs celebrated foundry housed in the Sculpture
Building, and the adjacent Moving Image Studio.

The programme welcomes approaches from people of diverse
backgrounds and experience, and the discourse will continue to
embrace performance, theatre, film and urbanism as much as any
historical fine art practices.

printmaking@rca.ac.uk
rca.ac.uk/printmaking

sculpture@rca.ac.uk
rca.ac.uk/sculpture

Sculpture Sculpture Foundry

Moving Image and Performance Ball Breaker, Echo Morgan (MA Printmaking)

Moving Image and Performance Routes

The School of Fine Art has established two new routes, in Moving
Image and in Performance, formalising a long-standing strength and
presence at the RCA. We are interested in building a diverse yet
collaborative cohort of practitioners who are working across disciplines
and languages broadly interpreted as artists moving image or
performance but including choreography, dance to film, work made live
with body or sound as well as fiction-led and documentary-based work.

Prospective MA and Research students apply through the four
existing Fine Art programmes Painting, Photography, Printmaking
or Sculpture but are based in their own specialist work area in the
Battersea campus. The Moving Image route is led by Stuart Croft, and
the Performance route is led by Nigel Rolfe. Students on both routes
have access to the Moving Image Studio (MIS) in Battersea, a teaching
and production centre for film and video in the School of Fine Art.
rca.ac.uk/fine-art-routes

Research Study for Salad Dressing and an Artichoke, Lee Triming (PhD Painting), 2013

Research in the School of Fine Art

School Research Leader Dr Trish Lyons

Senior Research Professor Richard Wentworth
The School of Fine Art is invested in art research as a method of
enquiry. Staff and students undertake research through studio
practice and critical discourse under a number of themes: Painting
Post-medium, Socio-political Art Practice, Image & Language,
Collisions in Print & Digital Practice, Drawing & Recording, Foundry
Research and Critical Spatial Practice. This all contributes to a
dynamic art research culture.

Research is explored in seminars, symposia and exhibitions, and
conducted at individual and group level. Staff and student research
is supported by world-class facilities including a full range of wellequipped moving image, performance, computing, photography,
printmaking and sculpture workshops, all staffed by highly skilled
technicians.

The School of Fine Art contributes to the Image & Language
research hub (imageandlanguage.rca.ac.uk), which has organised
symposia and publications, with invited speakers including Jean-Luc
Nancy, Marina Warner and Hito Steyerl.

Recently, Joan Jonas was our Leverhulme Visiting Research
Professor in Performance through the spring term of 2013.

A dedicated research space in Testbed at the Battersea campus
supports a stimulating environment for peer-to-peer meetings and
includes study spaces, a seminar/screening room.

Research Students MPhil and PhD

The School of Fine Art specialises in practice-based MPhil and PhDs.
Research students are based within one of the four programmes and
follow their own course of study, which is developed in a proposal
under the guidance of a research supervisor. Fine Art Research faculty
supervisors include; Margarita Gluzberg, Ian Kiaer, Yve Lomax,
Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Tim ORiley and Francette Pacteau. Researchers
are expected to produce a coherent and original body of work that
combines reflexive art practice with conceptual rigour. Your research
will be self-motivated and independent, enhanced by the following
support:
regular tutorials with your supervisor, who will be a practising artist
from our faculty
a Fine Art Research Programme of bi-monthly seminars offering
a discursive platform including exhibitions and creative writing
workshops
guest lectures
financial assistance to support the attendance of conferences and
for student-run research initiatives
a weekly cross-College Research Methods Course throughout the
first year of study, supporting students in the development of their
methodology
access to all specialist academic libraries and museum archives in
London.
For further details and application procedures please contact
fine-art-research@rca.ac.uk, with Fine Art Research Proposal
Guidance in the subject line of your email.
rca.ac.uk/fine-art-research

Wolfson Printmaking Hall, Dyson Building, (Photograph: Richard Haughton) 2013

Facilities
All four Fine Art programmes are housed in
purpose-built accommodation at the
Battersea campus. As well as individual studio
and workshop space, the new Dyson Building
offers a street-front 250sqm gallery and a
225-seat lecture theatre. The Moving Image
Studio an academic and technical facility
providing students with an equipped film and
video studio, a series of self-contained editing
suites, equipment loans, a technical teaching
area and a tutorial space is also located
in Battersea and led by tutor Stuart Croft.
Part of the Fine Art computer cluster is based
in the Sculpture Building. Facilities in other
Schools are available by arrangement, and
students are encouraged to use College-wide
facilities, including the Drawing Studio and
the RCA library, located in Kensington.
Painting
custom-built studio space for each student
large seminar room for group and individual
presentations
workshop for stretcher, panel and
frame-making
workshop with bench and hand tools for
woodworking and light fabrication
digital cameras, computing facilities, data,
slide and overhead projectors, DVD/Blu-ray/
video players, TV/flatscreen monitors, audio
equipment for sound performances, etc

Photography
custom-built shared studio space and
workrooms
photography studios for daylight and
artificial light
a range of lenses and analogue cameras
from 35mm to 10 x 8
high-resolution film scanners
digital imaging cameras for still and moving
image
darkrooms for exhibition-size colour and
black-and-white prints, analogue and digital
processing of colour negatives and
black-and-white film
large-format colour printers

data, slide, video and overhead projectors,

as well as digital cameras

Printmaking
dedicated work space for each full-time
student
well-equipped workshops for plate and
stone lithography, intaglio, relief and
screen-printing
large-format digital printers, scanners and
computers, giving students access to a
wide range of digital media
bookable space to experiment with
large-scale work and installation
archive of prints by past students, guest
artists and staff used for inductions and
collaborative seminars with students from
the CWA&D programme

Admissions
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU
admissions@rca.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 7590 4444
rca.ac.uk

Sculpture
large, lofty and adaptable building, serving
both as pragmatic workshops/studios and
as open, airy exhibition spaces
well-equipped workshops for metal and
wood
equipment for welding and a foundry for
casting in bronze, aluminium and other
metals
spray booth with dedicated extraction
small ceramic kiln
project space available for students to book

School
school-of-fine-art@rca.ac.uk
For more information about the School
please go to
rca.ac.uk/school-of-fine-art

Painting
Photography
Printmaking
Sculpture