MFA Drawing

The MFA Drawing gives you the opportunity to develop drawing practice in a supportive, nurturing environment through a challenging and stimulating programme of modules.

Each module will build and develop drawing and research enquires to provide a creative and intellectual framework for the exploration of current attitudes and phenomena in the context of contemporary drawing practice. 

The course supports students with a high level of motivation who have established an individual voice through a successful body of work and enquiry at undergraduate study or through professional experience. 

Drawing will be presented as an open-ended proposition where the limits of the form are being tested, redefined and expanded by its practitioners.  

You will develop drawing, discursive skills and agendas that re-orientate their practice in ways that have a sustainable long-term impact on their practice.

The course embraces all forms of drawing practice and you will be invited to consider the many ways drawing is essential to thinking. Drawing connects to many cross-disciplinary activities, as well as maintaining its own subject specificity.

Such explorations will lead to art historical and poly-cultural examinations of drawing, embracing the diversity and range of interests of the student cohort. You will consider the importance of drawing to education and visual literacy, childhood development, and explore the relationship between a drawing practice and well-being.

The MFA Drawing promotes the understanding that drawing is the most democratic of artforms, allowing for transhistorical investigation, more readily crossing boundaries of cultures, connoisseurship, genres, with multiple applications.

You will be encouraged to discover and connect with active drawing networks, practitioners, and research areas in both historical and contemporary contexts.

The MFA Drawing tests conventional methodologies and emergent innovations alike, exploring a range of strategies, materials, and technologies with the aim of each student formulating a tested, meaningful methodology for their drawing. Process orientated, making drawings as a group, or individually, in response to drawing prompts, drawing from ‘the body’, drawing from ‘nature’, the students will be encouraged through making and critical reflection to challenge assumptions about the roles and definitions of drawing.

Critical thinking and research will support the re-orientating the students practice to relevant and purposeful enquiry that reveals how the boundaries of a discipline or subject can shift the prism of drawing practice and research.

Diversity of thinking and making will be extended through critical interrogation, debate, and peer learning, both in physical/studio/workshop communities, and via digital communities.

The course strengthens each individual’s self‐evaluation, reflective practice, and cumulative progression.

Image credit/description: M.Lohrum, 'You Are It' (2020), Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2020, installed at Cooper Gallery being enacted by DJCAD students.