Fine Art

Fine art at degree level is a discipline of sustained creative inquiry that develops your artistic practice within a rigorous academic and studio environment. At Teesside University, the BA Fine Art is a three-year full-time programme that includes a sandwich year and work placement, giving you professional experience in arts contexts alongside the intensive studio and critical work that the degree demands. The programme develops not just your technical range but also the collaborative, communicative, and project management skills that professional artistic life requires.

As the current description notes, you will collaborate with fellow students to produce creative projects in response to briefs, developing your capacity to work within constraints and in dialogue with others while maintaining your own creative voice. Studio practice is central to the degree: you will work across and through different materials, processes, and conceptual approaches, building a body of work that reflects your developing interests and abilities. Critical and theoretical study of art history and contemporary art practice runs alongside the studio work, giving you the contextual understanding that allows your own practice to be situated and discussed with depth.

Art education at this level is as much about developing the capacity to sustain and articulate a creative practice as it is about mastering any particular medium.

Fine art graduates work across the creative and cultural sectors. Professional artistic practice, teaching and lecturing in art and design, arts administration, gallery and museum work, community arts, public art commissioning, arts journalism, and creative roles in design and the media are among the careers that fine art graduates build. The combination of creative thinking, practical skill, critical awareness, and collaborative experience that Teesside's degree develops also transfers to industries beyond the arts where creative problem-solving and visual communication are valued.

The sandwich year provides professional experience that supports career entry directly. Some graduates go on to postgraduate study in fine art, including MFA programmes that are increasingly the professional qualification for practising artists in the UK and internationally.