Jewellery MA and MFA | Silversmithing MA and MFA

The Jewellery & Silversmithing Department at ECA has an outstanding record of student, graduate and staff achievement. The evidence for this lies in the national and international reputation of the Department for excellence and innovation and in the number of awards and prizes consistently won over many years. Our graduates progress both into the manufacturing industry and into the applied arts arena, and are sought both by employers and curators.

The MA and MFA programmes offer the graduate an excellent opportunity to develop to a higher level an original and significant body of work, underpinned by rigorous research and professional practice.

We encourage our students to approach their practice in a questioning and self-reflective way. Research and practical experimentation is  integrated and symbiotic. Our students achieve an awareness of international activity in the field and the contextualisation of their own personal research.

The staff, all of whom have considerable reputations for their own professional work, encourage an atmosphere of trust and intimacy in which individual talent and expression can flourish.

With individual bench spaces, machine workshops and a drawing studio, the department provides the perfect environment to experiment and explore in pursuit of personal expression. Experimentation with non-traditional materials, such as rubber, perspex and paper, and with radical forms and altered scale, is encouraged. Previous masters students have explored a diversity of approaches from the embedded object to the relationship between architecture and jewellery. The exhibitions resulting from such investigations have been innovative and dramatic.

While a written dissertation forms part of the assessment process, these programmes are designed as a means of developing and extending creative practice. Students who wish to concentrate on theory will find the programmes offered by the Centre for Visual & Cultural Studies more appropriate; Contemporary Art Theory, Visual Culture and Visual and Material Culture.

At ECA we have an international body of postgraduate students coming from different cultural traditions to work in a broad range of silversmithing and jewellery design within an integrated framework.

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