Read more information about our featured artist and other graduates on the Alumni webpage.

Minimum Tariff: 300
UCAS Code: W232
Admissions Tutor: Ingrid Murphy
Email: imurphy@cardiffmet.ac.uk

The BA Hons Ceramics programme prides itself on the creativity, technical expertise and professionalism of its graduates.

Students have the opportunity to work across a broad range of processes, exploring the full potential of ceramic applications. Work from recent graduates has included: domestic tableware, fine art, figurative sculpture, installation, performance, film, animation, product design and surface pattern. Students create their own route through the programme, working in both traditional materials and, where appropriate, digital media. Although a specialist ceramic programme, we welcome student keen to work with other materials including glass, textiles, metal and ‘smart’ materials. Students have access to excellently equipped workshops and have a dedicated personal studio space. A dynamic team of technician demonstrators, all first-rate ceramicists in their own right, supports them.

In year one and year two, equipped with the ideas and skills achieved in their subject modules, students choose a further module where they can employ, extend and challenge those ideas and skills. The modules on offer will include ones where students will work alongside leading researchers on an enquiry based project, and others which involve them in an exploration of a challenging subject. These include modules on: the figure in art; creative strategies, drawing and visual studies: advanced material investigation; the physical and the virtual; and narrative.

Some of the modules on offer might involve a period abroad, studying in Venice or the States, or might be an Erasmus exchange. There are also opportunities to undertake a work placement or study how to set up your own business. In all of these modules, students respond to the challenges through their own practices, employing the skills and ideas from Ceramics, informed and stimulated by the challenge of the module itself and by the opportunity to work with fellow students from across the School.

‘At a time when ceramics education is being severely eroded, when courses are closing or being broadened into a nebulous dilution, Cardiff’s BA and MA programmes are nationally envied and respected.’ David Whiting, MA Ceramics External Examiner

In the third year, students devote themselves to the exploration of their own questions, within the area of practice that they have elected through the support and advice of the academic team. In this year and especially within the dissertation and the work prepared for the final show, the artist emerges into something unique to them and to the practice of ceramics.

All students undertake modules that develop critical and sometimes radical approaches to how we see and construct the world. These modules provide some of the tools that can be employed to question through creative practice how meaning is made as well as why meaning is a contested area. These will also equip students for the preparation of their final dissertation. Taught on a cross-disciplinary basis, the content of these modules will draw on anything and everything, from Constable to cosmetic surgery, from Bernard Leach to Elvis Presley impersonators, and from aesthetics to punk rock.