Craft and Material Practices Arts University Plymouth

Overview

With almost 150,000 people employed in the UK’s craft industry, skilled craftspeople are putting the country on the map for original, forward-thinking contemporary design. The relationship between thinking and making is constantly evolving. Experimentation and innovation are driving a new wave of craftspeople to explore original directions, often looking to develop methods in which we can live harmoniously within natural and fabricated environments while supporting a healthy ecosystem.

Our spacious Materials Lab includes specialist facilities for ceramics, glass, metal, and wood, encouraging you to explore traditional making alongside the rapid digital prototyping facilities in our Fab Lab, giving you the opportunity to reinvent craft for the 21st century. However, learning isn’t limited to our design studios and workshops – you will meet some of the UK’s most inventive and entrepreneurial contemporary makers and thinkers through studio visits, demonstrations, and presentations.

You’ll study specialist ceramics techniques such as throwing, slip casting, slab-building, coiling, glazing, and raku firing. Working with glass will include hot glass making, kiln-formed glass, coldworking, and lampworking. Working with metals will see you casting, welding, and grinding. If you’re looking to specialise in wood-working, you’ll have the opportunity to learn woodturning, joinery, and CNC routing. In the Fab Lab you will experience laser cutting, CNC milling, and 3D printing.

Through the use of these traditional materials, as well as explorations in smart and adaptive materials, you’ll develop new modes of creative authorship through experimentation, research, and invention.