Integrated Foundation Year

Foundation year modules

Play Make Draw

You'll explore and expand on a broad range of approaches within art and design. We'll introduce the notion of a personal body of work; integral to this is the development of contextual awareness; through the interpretation of information and ideas.

Evolve

Identify and develop personal connections to explore ways of working within contemporary art and design. You'll reflect on and evaluate your progress and performance, and develop a responsive approach to advice and guidance. You'll also maintain reflective records via sketchbooks, logs, and/or journals.

Develop

Key to this module is your reflective and analytical approach to personal learning, project planning, and outcomes. You'll identify and adapt appropriate methods and materials to develop ideas that address specific pathway briefs. You'll also develop an integrated approach to research and ideas, maintaining a detailed reflective journal throughout.

Realize

You'll create, manage, and curate a body of work within your chosen specialism for public exhibition. You'll write a proposal outlining a sustained art and design project that is inspirational, realistic, and achievable (using a wide range of critical, contextual perspectives) and identify your project aims, objectives, and influences.

Reflection and evaluation will play a key role in this task, and your work must be supported by evidence of this process, together with your experimentations and research into the work of others to underpin and support your project.

What you'll learn

Overview

Develop your ideas, skills and confidence during this Foundation year, in readiness for your chosen degree course.

Begin with a fast-paced introduction to experimentation and play as forms of investigation through active drawing, observation, making and recording.

You'll continue your enquiries into materials, processes and concepts, and select media, materials and technologies to create personal solutions in response to course briefs.

Finally, you'll specialise in your chosen discipline. You'll prepare and define objectives for a major personal project, assess your own work in relation to that of others, visually investigate and improve your preliminary ideas, and successfully oversee your major personal project from beginning to end.

How will I be assessed?

You're assessed at the end of each module via presentation of your work, be it experimental, developmental, journal-based, reflective analyses of talks and workshops, or documentation and analysis of exhibitions visited with the course.

Presented works may include journals / sketchbooks, material experiments / test samples, and digital files, in the form of USB, DVD and/or URLs.

How will I be taught?

All teaching staff are practising artists or designers.

Teaching is held through personal tutorials, as well as demonstrations and discussions. There are lectures on aspects of contemporary practice, in addition to collaborative work and outside visits.

You’ll be taught in a variety of ways, which may include:

• Workshops
• One-to-one tutorials
• Lectures
• Demonstrations.