Sculpture & Expanded Practice
Sculpture & Expanded Practice offers a creative studio and workshop environment for making and exploring contemporary art. There are a wide variety of materials, processes and contexts to engage with while studying Sculpture at NCAD where we value experimentation and the development of unique creative voices. The department has a celebrated reputation for producing exciting, innovative and successful artists.
What will I study?
In this department you will learn through doing, reflecting and responding as you create objects and forms across traditional materials like wood, metal, plaster and combined materials as well as other less traditional or ‘immaterial’ forms like video, sound, performance and participatory art. You will be challenged to embrace or reject new ideas and methods of transforming the solid and the social. In Sculpture, students are supported to create ambitious and challenging projects, engage with spaces beyond the gallery and the campus, and learn the professional skills to be an artist.
Year 1
The programme encourages visual curiosity and open-ended inquiry through a wide variety of sensory experiences with 3D forms. The first semester focuses on interdisciplinary Art and Design research, observation and analysis. In the second semester, all Fine Art students get a working taste of subjects with six weeks of workshops in two pathways selected from: Ceramics and Glass, Media, Painting, Print, Sculpture and Textile Art & Artefact. The balance is spent in the Sculpture & Expanded Practice Department, making work with student peers similarly interested in exploring different kinds of approaches, materials and processes, and developing skills in the language of contemporary Fine Art.
Year 2 – Final Year
From year 2 students should continue to gain confidence and fluency in a broad range of 3D skills. In these years you will be asked to identify a strong personal direction for your sculptural practice through directed learning and independent self-directed study. You will have your own studio space and shared workshops to access daily. Modules, projects, formal lectures and informal seminars will expose you to distinctive approaches, theories and techniques specific to contemporary sculpture and also expanded practices like artistic research, public art and socially engaged practice. There is a distinct emphasis on research skills which will help you navigate through questions like: How do I test this material? Who is my art for? How do I make work for the public domain?
Year 3: Studio+ & International
An optional opportunity to gain experience in a range of social and cultural contexts in the world beyond NCAD. Build your skills as an artist while working with an organisation with links to the School of Fine Art. Studio+ can also include a period of study abroad through the Erasmus programme with internationally recognised art faculties partnered with NCAD. Students who choose Studio+ will complete a 4 year BA Fine Art or a 4 year BA Fine Art (International).
How will I be assessed?
Assessment is usually at the half year and full year semester points and will focus on your creative processes, your tests and trials, and the artwork produced. Assessment is centred around your art activities, what you have discovered in the process and how you critically reflect on this. There are also requirements to participate in ongoing course dialogues and to communicate and evolve views and perspectives.
Critical Cultures
Become a critically engaged, reflective and effective practitioner through studying the connections between history, theory and practice in modern and contemporary contexts.
Find out more on the Find out more
Opportunities after graduation
An art education offers a rich way of engaging with life. Many of our graduates go on to become practising artists in Ireland and internationally. We have a record of our graduates becoming significant individual artists and curators in the cultural field, in established galleries and other sites, and in becoming part of artist/creative teams. We have many vivid examples of students self-starting and creating residencies, studios, pop-up exhibitions and all forms of cultural entrepreneurship. Our graduates are enabled to find imaginative, creative ways forward in the rapidly changing landscapes of our time. A number of our graduates also go on to postgraduate study, at NCAD and at other institutions nationally and internationally. NCAD offers MA, MFA and PhD pathways and the department specifically supports the new MA Art and Social Action programme.
Student & Graduate Stories
Lia Cowan, BA in Fine Art Sculpture and Education 2017
Why did you decide to study at National College of Art & Design?
NCAD to me is the holy grail of art colleges in Ireland. As I was interested in Fine Art, I knew there was no other college for me. Having visited NCAD on numerous occasions during my time in school, the Sculpture department always felt like the right fit for me.
Kevin Gaynor, BA in Fine Art Sculpture and Expanded Practice 2018
Why did you decide to study at National College of Art & Design?
Studying cinematography in Ballyfermot College of Further Education gave me the lens-based skills I still use today, but it was at the end of year assessment when a tutor reviewed my work and said: "Why aren't you in NCAD?" that I realised that he was right. That gave me the clarity I needed and I began to work on my portfolio the next day.
At the beginning of my degree, I was sceptical of the idea of ‘teaching art’, and still am. But even through this scepticism, the years I spent at NCAD gave me a space to focus on the socially-active sculptural methods that I'm still using today.