Fine Art BA (Hons)

Aberystwyth University

The teaching of Art at Aberystwyth has a distinguished history that goes back to 1917 when it was one of only a handful of British Universities to be concerned with the Art and Crafts Movement. The listed building which houses the School of Art has been adapted to meet the needs of today’s Fine Art education while retaining many of its original features. It is an elegant symbol of the School’s aim to link the traditional and the contemporary.

The School of Art can offer you excellent facilities for the study of painting, the graphic arts, and photography, with studio facilities for painting, printmaking in intaglio, lithography, screen and relief printing, typography, black and white and colour photography, computer graphics, and most forms of reprographics.

As a student at Aberystwyth, you will have access to a superb range of visual arts, including an extensive collection of original artworks. The School of Art is an accredited Museum that runs its own galleries and houses a collection of some 20,000 prints, photographs, drawings and watercolours, ceramics and decorative art dating from the fifteenth century to the present day. The Ceramics Gallery in the University Arts Centre also houses an important collection of twentieth-century studio pottery.

As a close department, we pride ourselves on our close association with the University's Arts Centre, which is one of the largest in the UK and a major venue for exhibitions by contemporary artists and designers. Our lecturers include practising artists, historians and theorists, who are highly regarded in their respective fields. Fine Art at Aberystwyth University will allow you to develop new or broaden and deepen your skills in painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, book illustration, experimental film, installation and site-specific performance.

Students in our department can exploit our exciting opportunities such as studying abroad under the Erasmus programme (studying in any of our European partnered Universities in countries such as Turkey, Norway and Germany). We also offer students to take part in several field trips and the destinations in the past have included: Madrid, Paris, Rome Moscow, Lisbon to name a few.

Our employability statistics speak for themselves, in the 2017 DLHE results, 100% of UK/EU undergraduates from the School of Art who graduated in 2016 were in professional-level jobs or graduate-level further study six months after graduating (DLHE, 2017).

Upon successful completion of this course, you will emerge with real-world capabilities and possess the core employability skills enabling you to pursue careers as Art Historians; Arts journalists and research; Art directors; Easel painting and works on paper conservators; education; academia. A number of our graduates have found employment with:

The Tate;

Victoria and Albert Museum;

Royal Academy of Arts;

The Saachi Gallery;

The BBC;

The Royal Collection Trust;

Design and Arts Council