BA Fine Art Workshops Sem 1

Workshop Preferences

Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) has a two stage enrolment process for Workshops 2 – 5.

Stage 1: Students enrol via Enrolment Online into Workshop course codes.
Stage 2: Students submit Workshop preferences through myTimetable.

Workshops for second and third year are are offered under the following course codes in semester 1:

Workshop 3 VART 3651 – 2nd year students
Workshop 5 VART 3653 – 3rd year students

Important Notes:

Workshop classes are 12 credit point courses and require 3 contact hours per week + associated learner directed hours.
You cannot repeat any class in your preference lists.
Although we would like to offer all of the Workshop options below, classes are subject to viability and may not run if numbers are too low.
Refer to RMIT Timetable website for deadlines and details around preference process.

MyTimetable Important Dates

Early December 2024 myTimetable available in read-only mode
Late January 2025 Preferencing Opens
5pm Sunday 9 February 2025 Preferencing Closes
10am Monday 17 February 2025 Review and allocation adjustment opens (based on availability)
5pm TBC Allocation adjustment closes

Internship VART3510

Teaching staff: Jerry Galea &TBC

Location: TBC

Time: TBC

In this course, you will participate in an internship or artist in residence program in an arts, photographic or cultural organisation, company, festival, commercial industry, gallery, museum or studio, through dual negotiation with the industry and School. You will be expected to work as directed by the host organisation, to address and solve real-world issues in an arts industry workplace environment.

This is a Work Integrated Learning course designed to facilitate a practical working relationship between you and selected arts and cultural organizations.

More information about RMIT’s Work Integrated Learning can be found here: http://emedia.rmit.edu.au/careerstoolkit/welcome?destination=node/1

Please find link to the course guide.

This elective can be taken also as a workshop option

Experimental Clay Materiality

Teaching staff: TBC
Friday 9.30am – 12.30pm
Location 6.02.01

An experimental approach to key ceramic materials in glaze formulation and their role in the development of unique surfaces. How extraneous factors such as found materials, kiln atmosphere, clay bodies and methods of application can promote unexpected outcomes.

LENA YARINKURA, ECHIDNA,2001 BRONZE, TWIGS

Bronze Foundry

Teaching staff: Simon Perry

Friday 9:30am – 12:30pm

Location 37.01.7

This course is designed to introduce you to the fundamental techniques of bronze casting. Bronze casting has been used across continents for thousands of years and is now predominantly used for casting fine art objects. In this course you will develop practical skills across a range of processes and materials, which are commonly used in sculptural practice and industry with a focus on the lost wax casting method. The course involves preparation for two bronze pours and will involve practical instruction in the use of workshop equipment alongside relevant health and safety training. Casting in bronze involves a team effort, work boots, covered clothing and safety glasses. This course is mainly practical but with appropriate tutorial presentations covering theoretical and relevant historical background. Please note: You cannot complete this course without regular attendance due to the processes involved.

Drawing and Body

Teaching staff: Irene Barberis

Friday 1:30pm – 4:30pm

Location 4.5.05

In this workshop course you will explore drawing techniques of the body and approaches to perceiving and expressing the body in space, the body as vessel, sign and as site of meaning. It includes life drawing and general drawing approaches, as well as ideas of embodiment and experience. You will investigate thematic and self-directed projects addressing self and personal vision within your emerging art practice through drawing and related practices that are relevant to a range of areas of study.

Enameling and Colour for Metal

Teaching staff: Dr Kirsten Haydon

Friday 1:30pm – 4:30pm

Location 2.1.03

In this workshop, students will focus on the concepts of applying colour to metal. This course is for all fine art students and looks at exploring how heat and metal can be utilised to create new enamel surfaces in fine art. Vitreous enamel are created using heat to fuse glass on metal and this outcome can provide jewel-like qualities and lustrous and layered colours and patterns over copper, silver and steel. Students will design and apply their own personal iconography to metal and enamel. Students will explore how to translate their ideas and drawings using vitreous enamels materials with processes such as stencilling, sifting, drawing, painting, foiling and graffito.

Artist Books

Teaching staff: TBC

Friday 9:30am – 12:30pm

Location 49.2.02

In this course you will explore the possibilities offered by the artist’s book for the presentation of visual information and ideas. A broad range of book binding methods will be introduced and applied in hands-on, interactive online workshops that encourage you to think laterally about what a book might be and how a narrative might be constructed. The methods of bookbinding covered in this course incorporate both adhesive and non-adhesive book binding methods, from simple folding techniques to more formal sewn binding methods. You will discuss and apply bookbinding methods appropriate to a range of mediums in order to extend your creative practice.

DEBORAH WILLIAMS, SUDDEN DISTURBANCE. 2021

Photo Etching

Teaching staff: Deborah WIlliams

Friday 1:30pm – 4:30pm

Location 49.2.18

In this course, you will further develop your understanding of analogue and digital technologies focusing on intaglio etching, with an emphasis on photographic imagery and processes. Lectures and workshops will provide a mixture of theory and technical skills enabling you to produce works and reflect on the role of traditional and electronic print media in contemporary art. This will help you to expand the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of your art practice.

Drawing Electric

Teaching staff: TBC

Friday 9:30am – 12:30pm

Location TBC

In this course we will explore drawing in relation to electricity. This may result in digital drawings, A.I. driven outcomes, animation, 3d modelling, remote drawings and drawing with light.

As electrical impulses in the brain transform through our nervous systems into marks on a surface or in space, be it a cave wall, paper or a hologram, electricity is key to the life force of creative endeavors. From simply putting the light on to see what you are doing to being connected into complex electrical networks of AI algorithms, Drawing Electric will experiment with the material possibilities of drawing in relation to electricity.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER,detail 2001

Soft Sculpture

Teaching staff: TBC

Friday 1:30 – 4:30pm

Location 37.1.07

This course focuses on the possibilities of making soft sculpture within a contemporary art framework. Students will undertake a series of short workshops which introduce a variety of conceptual and technical skills including basic pattern making, working with scale, hand and machine sewing, armature construction and the use of readymades. These skills will be contextualized by the works of a range of artists. Students will develop their own works using a range of pliable materials and are expected to develop new experimental approaches and definitions in the production of soft sculpture.

Foundation Video and Sound

please note this course has limited places

Teaching staff TBC

Friday 9:30am – 12:30pm

Location 4.2.3, 4.2.06

This is a first year workshop open to second and third year students. This course will introduce you to the techniques of Video & Sound art. You will engage with processes, tools, technologies and materials and focus on acquiring the skills required to make time-based art works. This workshop will inform your practical studio investigations through a series of projects. You will also develop capacities to critically reflect upon, analyse and apply the technologies and processes within your specialised studio by considering the fundamental principles and elements of art.

Ceramic Form and Surface

this course has limited places

Teaching staff: TBC

Friday 1.30 – 4.30 pm

Location 6.2.01

This course is an explorative approach to hand forming clay. Investigating influences and techniques, you will explore non-conventional sculptural methods to manipulate and develop form and surface qualities. Projects will encourage material experimentation with a focus on practice and enquiry.

Foundation Ceramics

this course has limited places

Teaching staff TBC

Friday 9.30 12.30

Location 4.01.01This is an introductory workshop course that will introduce you to technical skills in Ceramics focussing on plaster moulds and multiples. You will engage with materials, processes, tools, technologies and focus on acquiring the skills required to make Ceramic art works. This workshop will inform your practical studio investigations through a series of projects.

INSTALLATION VIEW OF ‘HELTER SKELTER: LA ART IN THE 1990S’

Pop Trash & Remix

Teaching staff: Ian Haig

Friday 1.30 4.30 pm

Location 4.01.01

“Everyone knows the usefulness of the useful, but no one knows the usefulness of the useless” Chuang Tzu

In this course you will explore how aspects of low, pop and everyday culture can inform creative practice and offer new ways of considering cultural analysis and critique. What is meant by the definitions of trash, kitsch, and pop? And what kind of cultural hierarchies and histories do they represent? Through a range of discussion and practical experiences and material exploration you will investigate strategies such as appropriation, montage, assemblage, and remix to question cultural forms, hierarchies and value systems and explore the vast and complex terrain of pop and trash culture.

Students will be introduced to artists working with Pop and Trash themes and will explore a range of media and techniques, from junk collage, found imagery/footage, AI, obsolete media (such as vinyl records), low fi and mass-produced materials and other mixed media and found objects. Building upon your strengths, you will be encouraged to consider the discarded, rejected, and the overlooked in your art practices.

Projection Light and Optics

Teaching staff: TBC

Friday 1.30 4.30 pm

Location 4.2.3

In this course you will explore the possibilities of light, lighting and projection, experimenting with old and new projection technologies such as the Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida, overhead projection, contemporary digital projection and film/video lighting kits both as a creative tool for making art and a mode of display.

Foundation Gold & Silversmithing

this course has limited places

Teaching staff: TBC

Friday 9.30 to 12.30pm and Thursday 4.30 to 7.30pm

Location 2.1.03

This is an introductory workshop course that will introduce you to technical skills in Gold & Silversmithing. You will engage with materials, processes, tools, technologies and focus on acquiring the skills required to make Gold & Silversmithing art works. This workshop will inform your practical studio investigations through a series of projects.

Hybridity & Migration

Teaching staff Sofi Basseghi

Friday 1.30 to 4.30pm

Location 2.3.04

The histories of migrations have had a significant impact on the world, its cultures, peoples and nations. Hybridity, particularly through a postcolonial lens, has seen the development of new transcultural forms. Together the interrelated impacts of hybridity and migration will establish a platform which gives you permission to draw on the rich and diverse fields of knowledge embedded within this semester, to use within frameworks of contemporary art practice.

These fields of knowledge, which this course navigates, are complex and extremely relevant to contemporary art. Artists have an important role to play in interrogating, influencing and shaping this discourse as it is being played out across nations, politics and communities.

Bio-Materiality

Teaching staff: TBC

Friday 9.30 to 12.30pm

Location 2.4.04 In this course you will explore the origins of your materials and how different kinds of matter can constitute meaning in the making of artworks. You will experiment with ephemeral forms and approaches to making that extend beyond the use of traditional art materials and develop projects that expand your practice beyond the studio and gallery settings. Students will be introduced to contemporary artists working with the origins and agencies of a range of materials and will have the opportunity to put these methods into practice within a series of self-directed projects.

Undead Materiality

Teaching staff: Mark Edgoose and TBC

Friday 1.30 to 4.30pm

Location TBC

In this course you will explore the origins of your materials and how different kinds of matter can constitute meaning in the making of artworks. You will experiment with ephemeral forms and approaches to making that extend beyond the use of traditional art materials and develop projects that expand your practice beyond the studio and gallery settings.