Jewellery & Metal (MA)

Jewellery and Metal is situated within Applied Arts in the School of Arts and Humanities. Applied Arts disciplines are always at the convergence of things. Whether that’s the cusp of art/design, material/immaterial, digital/analogue, Applied Arts require multidirectional attention and thoughtful and considered interactions with materials and materiality.

The Jewellery and Metal (JaM) programme seeks to unpick the relationship between people and things, pushing beyond the subject-object binary and JaM students explore the multiple ways we are entrapped and enthralled by the complex entanglement of the material and immaterial worlds. Through the emergent acts of making, JaM believes we can shed new light on these complex and essential relationships, revealing great depths in our understanding of, and being in, the world.

As artists and designers, we engage with the making process as an essential way of materialising ideas, thoughts, feelings, offering a space for innovative and radical new ways of approaching jewellery, objects, and metal. We are responsive to the rapidly changing social and cultural landscape, drawing on history and technology in nurturing intellectual and creative skills directed at understanding and pushing forward jewellery and objects of human making. The rich and extensive bodies of knowledge associated with jewellery and metal object-making underpin an approach that is outward-looking and open to the wider discourse of “things” connected to contemporary life. Students can expect to work with, and through, a vast array of material possibilities, exploring a multiplicity of possible narratives.