BA (Hons) Fine Art and Creative Writing (Placement Year)

Lancaster's degree in Fine Art and Creative Writing is taught jointly by the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and the Department of English and Creative Writing. This course is ideal for anyone with strong academic and creative abilities who wants to study fine art alongside creative writing.Your Creative Writing courses are taught by a team of widely published authors through a combination of lectures, readings, practice and discussion in regular tutor-led workshops. Your degree includes an Introduction to Creative Writing in your first year, and in your second and third years of study you will choose additional genre-specific units such as Short Fiction, Poetry Writing or Creative Non-fiction.Fine Art at Lancaster gives you the opportunity to integrate Art Practice with Art History/Theory at a high level. From the first through to the final year of your degree you will develop creative and technical skills in painting, drawing, sculpture, digital art and their hybrids. While we have no ‘house style’ the emphasis is on Fine Art practice and Fine Art ‘thinking’ rather than illustration. Our aim is for you to develop the practice and ideas that best reflect your aims and values as a young Fine Artist. Your tutors will be professional artists and publishing historians and the mix of academic and creative skills gained at Lancaster makes you highly attractive for postgraduate study and employers.You will have the opportunity to spend Year 3 on a placement with a public, private or voluntary organisation in the UK or overseas. This experience should boost your employment prospects and help you to decide on your career direction and the kind of organisation in which you want to work once you graduate. You will be doing a real, responsible job – with all the satisfaction that brings.Applying for a placement is a competitive process and our Placements Team will support you in finding and applying for a suitable placement. The preparatory modules you will complete in years one and two are designed to give you the best chance of success in both your placement applications and the placement itself.One of the aims of the placement year is to enhance your understanding of the connections between theory and practice which could benefit your final year of study. Placements provide an exciting opportunity to build up experience and transferable skills, as well as to make contacts with potential employers, which can place you a step ahead in the graduate recruitment market.The University will use all reasonable effort to support you to find a suitable placement for your studies. While a placement role may not be available in a field or organisation that is directly related to your academic studies or career aspirations, all placement roles offer valuable experience of working at a graduate level and gaining a range of professional skills.If you are unsuccessful in securing a suitable placement for your third year, you will be able to transfer to the equivalent non-placement degree scheme and would continue with your studies at Lancaster, finishing your degree after your third year. The University offers a range of shorter placement and internship opportunities for which you would be welcome to apply.