Art Master of Research - MRes

The Master of Research in Art is a groundbreaking programme designed for artists, writers and practitioners working in any media to prepare to undertake a sustained long-term body of research or project through studio-based practice.

* Art processes, materials, and contexts fuel the core dynamic of this programme. The course provides the opportunity to develop the material, spatial, performative, and experimental publishing dimensions of your research practice alongside each other.

* You will receive a dedicated studio space regardless of the medium in which you work. Writers will be allocated a space alongside artists and practitioners, which demonstrates a key approach of the programme: to challenge hierarchies between mediums. 

* Your practice will be pushed to develop radical methods of questioning and inquiry. For example, through artistic perspectives that can be formed around making mistakes, not knowing, and tangents.

* You will establish your practice at its cutting edge by working directly with materials, objects, and subjects. Rather than creating distance and trying to remain objective, your ideas will develop through the process itself.

* Your research will not follow a fixed or linear path. Frameworks, starting points and questions will be formed by the experience and process of testing and making. You will be embedded within various discourses of art to further develop your approach.

* Throughout your studies, you will be challenged to fashion alternative strategies of generating findings outside of the question-answer binary.

Programme ethos

The programme aims to expand knowledge of the diversity and idiosyncrasy of art as a research process at this important moment, where research techniques are becoming more influential in contemporary art and where research councils are becoming more inclusive towards artistic research. We understand research to be a dimension of all contemporary art forms – sculpture, writing, installation, painting, performance, video, etc.

Art research methods are distinct from those across the social sciences. The strength of this programme is how it immerses you into the world of contemporary art research through your own practice.

As Michael Sheringham describes artists’ distinguished use of the project format: “The project is not designed to achieve a particular end, but to allow something unforeseen to happen.”