Fine Art Printmaking BA(Hons)

Image: Olivia Morgan

Fine Art Printmaking stimulates exploration, ideas, imagination and intellectual inquiry. Its evolving position in contemporary fine art practice provides students with a unique range of traditional processes, such as etching, screen print and lithography, while embracing digital technology.

Printmaking’s place within contemporary art practice is given a unique mobility by its evolving response to technological developments. This unfolding history provides the student with a range of media - the traditional and established alongside the contemporary and protean - collectively reflecting the central place of print in the wider culture.

Emphasis throughout the course is placed upon the distinctive nature of the discipline within the wider terrain of Fine Art and critical debate whilst supporting constructive questioning of what defines the specialism.

Our Fine Art Printmaking course stimulates exploration, ideas, imagination and intellectual inquiry. It places the practice of Fine Art Printmaking into context, both in terms of contemporary critical issues and the wider historical perspective.You will have access to a unique range of traditional processes while embracing the challenge of the latest developments in digital technology.The course emphasizes the specialist nature of printmaking, promoting a broad definition of printmaking, including what constitutes or challenges the notion of an ‘artist's print’.

You will be workshop based, in which the practical learning of skills takes place alongside critical debate, speculation and reflection.

You will be encouraged to develop as an individual artist, employing a plurality of means, skills and traditions appropriate to your work.

We will foster an interrelationship between your research and practice, aiming for you to continually reflect upon and question your practice in such a way as to sustain a lifetime commitment, enabling you to place your work within a professional context.

What is printmaking at Brighton?

Printmaking enjoys a very special place in contemporary Fine Art practice because of the way it can ‘change shape’ in response to wider technological developments. Traditional processes such as etching, lithography and screenprint cheerfully rub shoulders with digital and computer-generated image making. 

Fine Art Printmaking at Brighton places emphasis throughout the programme on the specialist nature of the discipline, which actively encourages a broad definition of printmaking. Some students work within the 'traditions' of the specialism, while others seek to extend its boundaries. Historically established methods can now also be used in conjunction with new media, to produce hybrid visual languages ‘customised’ to suit your own intentions.

Applicants should have an interest in fine art graphic languages such as drawing, collage, the photographic, text-orientated (including artists books) and the multiple, as well as traditional and digital print.

Your studio environment 

The workshops we offer on this Undergraduate Degree Course are now widely regarded as being amongst the best equipped in the country. The Course is housed on the top floor of the art school. Our extensive screenpint and lithography studios are situated next to etching and relief studios that look out towards the Brighton Dome.

As a Fine Art Printmaking student you will benefit from access to specialist printmaking facilities, these include Intaglio, Relief, Lithography and Screen-Print, as well as a large format digital printer. Highly experienced specialist technicians manage the comprehensive workshop facilities.

On this course you will based within Printmaking - but also benefit from being part of Fine Art and the wider community within the Faculty of Arts. Studies in Professional Development and Historical and Critical Studies complement Studio Practice units allowing for the situating of your practice in a wider critical and historical, professional context.

A team of research-informed tutors guide your learning experience. Tutorial advice and group seminars are calculated to identify and expand upon individual student interests whilst lectures provide a broader analytical platform for conjecture on creative approaches and professional positioning.

Printmaking is a specialist course within Fine Art and students benefit from the wider community that this offers. The course offers a distinctively stimulating and challenging environment, which promotes printmaking as an expanding medium in its own right, which enables creative realisation and challenges precedents. The printmaking course at Brighton has recorded distinctive rates of progression to postgraduate study and students routinely win awards and exhibit in prestigious venues.

Your own practice 

 From the outset of this undergraduate course we positively encourage creative diversity by giving you a combination of practical skills, independence in researching your own ideas and lively creative discussion about your progress. 

As a student at Brighton you'll be offered the opportunity to identify an individual approach to process that most closely supports the development of a personal language. This may occur through speculative engagement with new technologies, a commitment to the innovative use of traditional media, or an individually defined hybrid of contemporary and established media.

Year One

is the bridge that you take to cross from your previous experiences towards the development of an unpredictably new and convincing personal language. Technical inductions into all the main processes occur alongside exploratory, self-directed visual research into the interests and concerns that motivate you as an emerging artist. You will be able to discuss the advance of your own work and the work of others at small group tutorials. You and your Year group collaboratively plan a Year I group show. In the recent past this has been held at the Sussex Arts Club, St Andrew's Church, Marwood Studios and the Art Hotel. 

Year Two 

is an expedition into the widest possible range of creative possibilities that present themselves now that you can confidently begin to navigate the enormous territory that lies open to the Fine Art printmaker. You might decide to completely re-invent your practice, exploring previously un-thought of areas that have come to have resonance for you. Or you might return with deepened insights to the practice that you brought with you from Year I. The Year Two Fine Art Exhibition, held in and around the university gallery, gives you the opportunity to assess your progress in the context of your peers on the Fine Art specialisms. 

Year Three

sees your exploration of creative possibilities intensify even as you begin to consolidate your concerns and plan a resolved body of work for the Degree Show. This is an exciting time when the insights and experience you have gained from the entire course comes together to present your practice at its most imaginative, thought-provoking and professional. 

Historical and Critical Studies

complements the studio practice that forms the main element of the course. This lecture and essay based programme will help in developing your ability to assess your own work in the context of a wider cultural and historical framework. In the Third Year you will have the opportunity to significantly inform your understanding of the particular approaches and ideas that inform your studio practice by completing a five to seven thousand word research essay. 

Professional Development

supports your studio practice by introducing the practical, intellectual, organisational and administrative skills that underpin proper professional practice in Fine Art. In addition, you will be encouraged to develop these essential career skills in the context of Printmaking as a specialist discipline.

Image: Christopher Wiles, landscape (detail)

The Printmaking course has recorded distinctive rates of progression. Many students have progressed to postgraduate level study, masters or phd, with many opting to take PGCE.

Our students regularly enter national and international exhibitions.

Our alumni include Judith Alder (2003) and Roz Cran (2003) who, with Arts Council funding, developed the Breaking Ground Project (see a-n magazine web site and blog) in 2008/09. Roz Cran also had an animation premiered at Tate Modern as part of the international touring exhibition ‘Figuring Landscapes’. Madeleine Keep (2005) was granted a three-month internship at Tate Britain shortly after her graduation and has risen to become their Curator of Adult Education Programmes. Sarah Bridgeland (2004), Thomas Leighton (2004) and Alex Booker (2005) have all won awards and continue to exhibit in prestigious galleries both nationally and internationally. Betsy Dadd, who graduated in 2008, was awarded the Glyndebourne Opera Residency in the same year and is exhibiting recent prints at Flowers Graphics, London.

Recent graduate Katrina Mayo (2007) won the R.K. Burt Award at ‘Originals ‘07’, the annual Contemporary Printmaking exhibition in London.  Current Level 2 student Anna Roge was selected to exhibit work in  ‘TRYK’, Aalborg, Kunstpavillion, Denmark 2008. In 2009 Ania Zydron was selected for the Nagoya University of Art student exchange and took part an international student exhibition in July 2009. Several Printmaking students have won major prizes for their work at the Degree show - Olivia Morgan, (2009) Luke Smith (2009), Thomas Rees (2009), Betsy Dadd (2008). Christopher Wiles, who graduated in 2004, produced 'The Face of Peterborough' during his Artist in Residence at the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery 2010.