Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Textiles

at Arts University Bournemouth United Kingdom

Our course is designed to provide you with a high-quality education in contemporary art practice, and is delivered by highly respected tutors, acclaimed artists and excellent technicians.

Over the duration of the course you will develop your individual artistic voice, informed through your own research and critical evaluation, peer and tutor’s feedback and a deep understanding of your chosen materials. When you graduate, you will be fully equipped to contribute and add something new to the UK’s art scene as an emerging artist.

Exhibiting and being enterprising is a key part of our course. We offer many opportunities for you to exhibit your work with an emphasis on site-specific locations thanks to our unique partnerships with local museums, councils and research centers. We also have a series of international student artist residency placements and worldwide partner university study exchanges. All these experiences are specially created by our tutors to give you a real sense of what it means to be a professional artist - both in the studio and the broader world.

In the first year you will work in open plan studios and participate in collective workshops to find what inspires and excites you as an artist. In the following years you will develop your practical, theoretical and critical skills within your self-defined study plans. The course culminates in two exhibitions of your work for your final major project, one on campus at Bournemouth and the second in London.

We support and encourage experimentation and development of skills, and workshops are offered as a continual part of the course over the 3 years. These are conducted in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video, digital media and sonic art as well as seminars to foster your conceptual development and understanding of curation / how exhibitions are put together.

You will have additional access to the latest technology, such as laser cutters, CNC (computer numerically controlled) machines and 3D printers. Our aim is to provide you with a solid foundation so that you can create contemporary artworks with high technical skill combined with solid conceptual grounding.

Above all we offer a welcoming and inclusive course, set in a vibrant campus dedicated to creative practices of all kinds.

This course gives you the opportunity to develop a specialist career, working within fashion/beauty, advertising, documentary/editorial and portrait photography. Through the combination of creativity and technical skill, our students aspire to challenge perceptions, and push boundaries, through making imagery that’s at the forefront of contemporary photographic practice.

Graduates from this course have gone on to create images for clients including Louis Vuitton, Stella McCartney, Chanel, The Times Fashion Supplement, Love Magazine, Dazed and Confused, Huck, Kit Magazine, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Vogue (UK, India and Italy), Nike, Adidas, Lacoste, Wall Street Journal and the BBC.

If you want the opportunity to set the future agenda for commercial photography, and have the commitment and drive to make the most of every opportunity the course can give you, then we would love you to join.

BA (Hons) Costume offers a comprehensive approach to the study, interpretation and creation of costume. Students will become skilled at producing accurate historical recreations of costumes as well as expressing imaginative flair through creative and conceptual costume making. In addition, you will learn the art of tailoring and couture dressmaking.

Costume supervision is integral to the course and can be described as interpreting a two-dimensional costume design into a three-dimensional costume through sourcing and procuring garments. This exciting role places you at the heart of live productions, as you are key to ensuring the smooth running of the wardrobe department for all types of live performance.

The current BA (Hons) Costume and Performance Design course has been awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its ‘distinguished degree-level education in costume design for the UK’s leading creative industries’.

This degree will help you to prepare for professional practice (part 1 ARB/RIBA) and investigate the ways we live in the world through material and spatial relationships. You'll develop skills that will form the foundation of your career in architecture: making, collaborating, designing and communicating. Integrating practice with theory is at the heart of professional architectural practice, so that’s exactly what you’ll do here.

You’ll explore, experiment and develop new solutions. Discussing and presenting your work you'll share ideas about architecture through making tangible propositions, mindful of how they might be realised.

This ‘research-by-making’ approach encourages risk-taking, innovation and entrepreneurship. Both inside and outside of the studio, as well as in regular seminars, lectures and reviews, you’ll work on projects that require a creative balance of rigour and risk, informed by your design, technical and contextual knowledge.

At every stage in your degree, you’ll have opportunities to build on your own practice through collaborations with other courses. You’ll develop an understanding of the practice and theory of architecture, grounded in making, along with critical thinking and a familiarity with the material nature of architectural ideas. You’ll explore the practice of making thoughtful, tangible, inhabited places that mediate between the individual, the world we live in, and the others we live with.

Our course is designed to develop your individual pathway into this burgeoning sector of the creative and cultural industries. Events don’t just happen. Festivals, celebrations, exhibitions, pop-up events and multi-media events need creative, energetic and well-organised people to make them a reality. On this course, you’ll develop the skills and knowledge to conceive, plan and manage successful creative events.

Events are the product of teamwork involving people from a wide range of backgrounds and interests working together. A unique aspect of this course is that you’ll work with fellow students each year to devise and deliver a live event. You’ll discover and develop your own specialist interests and have the satisfaction of seeing the events you organise go ‘live’ in front of an audience.

Our work placement unit in the second year allows you to put these skills into practice in an industry setting. You’ll be surrounded by a wealth of creative talent and will have the opportunity to work with creative practitioners and external clients in the events world.

You’ll also learn how the events industry operates, and will develop skills in digital technology and business planning. Our graduates have gone on to use their skills in organisation, management, and marketing in festival production companies and in many of the top digital businesses, such as Spotify. They also work in multi-platform marketing and events companies, fashion businesses, world-class museums, and leading charities. Through theory, technique and practice, we’ll help you to develop as a successful creative events manager, with plenty to offer the arts and creative industries.

Painting defines its practice through the particularities of the painted field. The making materiality of the unique object, a globally acknowledged cultural history and the dedicated and dynamic relationship of the painted object to the painter. Painting in the 21st century is vital and relevant. Contemporary painting and what it can be, do and declare is meaningful. We ask how, why and according to what means.

The MA Painting course will explore this innovative and expansive territory in depth, dedicating itself to specialist study at postgraduate level.

MA Digital Fashion innovation recognises individuals and their aspirations and celebrates ideas, making, and creative risk-taking. Our guiding principle is to offer distinctive, exciting and challenging opportunities for you to engage in your respective subject disciplines. This will help you critically engage with, and redefine your particular approaches to your practices and position them within your chosen external, creative, economic, and cultural environment.

Animation’s position as an interdisciplinary field that draws from Art and Design, Film, Computing, Fine Art, Graphics (and other areas besides) necessarily means that top-level graduates in the field will have mastered a cross-disciplinary understanding of a range of skills, techniques, theories and discourses.

The overriding objective is to enable all MA Animation Production students to see themselves as part of a ‘community of practice’ (that includes research and critique, and the building of a ‘production culture’), existing not as atomised students ‘doing their own thing’, but as part of a meaningful whole.

You’ll be a BA graduate in Animation or a related discipline. Although we will consider good graduates from other disciplines – having accepted them from Costume, Graphics, Digital Media, Illustration, Modelmaking, Photography and Fine Art in the past – you must have some understanding of the animation production process to prosper on this course.

Our alumni have gone on to work at Aardman, ILM, Lupus Films, Framestore, Pixar, Moving Picture Company and many other companies. We’re proud of the network of AUB graduates who are now employed in animation – many of whom return to talk to current students.

Visual Communication combines skills in illustration, graphic design, typography and digital design to create images that persuade or inform.

From the start, the course focuses on hand-drawn imagery to develop a feel for the shapes and styles that connect with audiences. Practical experiences will be used to develop your skills. We’ll help you to build your visual awareness and understanding of the world around you. In addition to plenty of theory and debate, you’ll have the chance to work on live briefs with other students and find work placements in creative businesses.

Visual Communication underlines the importance of good ideas. You’ll leave with all the practical skills that you need to work in a vibrant and exciting industry. Our graduates work as freelancers in small design companies and with larger firms, both locally and internationally.

MA Photography course is a balance of art and commerce and is founded on the assertion that photography is a powerful form of communication that potentially connects with an audience of millions.

The course offers the opportunity to make professional work within, or crossing genres, whether it’s for publication, or the gallery. What defines it as professional, is that it is conceived and created with a specific audience in mind and is conscious of how meaning is affected by socio-political criteria.

The course is designed for ambitious photography graduates, or experienced photographers who wish to develop their knowledge and expertise in order to reach the very top of their field. We look for students with a passion for the subject and who are willing to take risks, and in doing so, push themselves to new heights.