MA Fine Art

Mode of study: Full-time
Study location: AUB Campus
How to apply: Apply directly to us

Exhibitions

The MA Fine Art course supports artistic individuals looking to shape a distinctive place for themselves within creative, academic and commercial contexts. In doing so, we place strong emphasis on public-facing engagement and professional experience through a continuous programme of self-directed exhibitions.

Developing ideas through studio-based research and testing findings in the public domain allows you to conduct essential analytical reflection and critique. Collaboration, curation, promotion and event management are embedded throughout the course.

You'll be encouraged to set up informal group critiques of your own work, generating ongoing discussion and debate. Industry partnerships and bi-annual drawing workshops bring artists, alumni, staff and students together in exploring themed practice. These activities sit within a purposefully diverse and inclusive model, where peers from differing cultural and disciplinary backgrounds participate in communities of practice and artist collectives that extend beyond graduation.

Student exhibitions

Dates: 23–29 August 2026

Location: GATHER, The Dolphin, Poole

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Dates: 22–30 July 2026

Location: Lighthouse, Poole

The 2026 MA Fine Art degree show, including photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, print, text and socially engaged practice. This cohort examines the overlooked and the discarded: waste and recycled material, packaging and its ethics; some work sits at the edge of the Anthropocene, questioning our shifting relationship with wildlife – whether wilderness and each other.

Some artists turn to the naturalist's eye, others to craft or satire, asking whether the natural world holds its own agency, consciousness, even spirit. Others look inward, tracing personal habits, the body, ageing process, roles and responsibilities of the personal or collective. Threads of isolation and loneliness weave through ideas of community and connection, alongside moments of stillness.

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Dates: 20–27 May 2026

Exhibiting artist: Kimberley Aurow

Uncertain Form begins at ground level with the surfaces we walk over without looking down. Fractured stone, scattered chalk, the dull grain of tarmac: these aren't backdrops but subjects, sites where solid matter is caught mid-collapse into dust and fragment. Kimberley Aurow's work lingers on that threshold, where material stability gives way to something looser, unfinished and unresolved.

Across this exhibition, form is treated less as a fixed outcome than as a temporary state, something arrived at through pressure, breakage, and accumulation, and always susceptible to further change.

Kimberley works with process as much as object, allowing chance, weathering, and physical force to shape the final work alongside deliberate decision-making. The result is a body of work that resists neatness: surfaces crack, edges blur, and structures hover between construction and erosion.

Date: January 2026

Location: TheBUG Gallery, AUB Campus

Exhibiting artist: Rui Li

Skin is an intimate exhibition of the body's surface, its blemishes, bruises, rashes, and scars rendered as a private visual language. Small kraft-paper cards, arranged loosely across shelves and walls, each hold a single mark: a cluster of red dots like a rash in bloom, a bruise fading through brown and violet, a web of yellow cracks spreading like broken capillaries.

Rui Li treats these marks not as symptoms but as drawings patient, close-looking studies of what skin does when it is stressed, healed, or scarred.

Elsewhere, the body extends into sculpture, where lengths of red and grey mesh twist and knot across the wall, fraying at their ends into loose tangled threads, suggesting vein, umbilical cord, nerve, echoing the skin's own condition as something provisional, always changing, marked and remarked by what happens to it. Skin asks us to look closely at what we usually look past: the body's smallest, most ordinary evidence of being alive.

Dates: December 2025 – January 2026

Location: Lighthouse, Poole

Cover Up presents 12 practices midway through the course. The title works both ways: to cover something is to conceal it, and also to work back over it, revising, obscuring, trying again. Both meanings underpin the work in this show.

Presented at a developmental stage of MA Fine Art, the works gathered here are deliberately experimental and openly unfinished. Nothing on display claims to be a final statement; each piece is a working position, a layer laid down before the next decision is made.

Seen together, the 12 practices speak to the ordinary, necessary mess of art-making before it's resolved. Cover Up brings that process into public view, treating the unresolved as a working condition worth showing.

Dates: 15–27 November 2025

Location: TheBUG Gallery, AUB Campus

Exhibiting artists: Vikki Clements | Bridget Eastman | Gemma Garley

This exhibition brings together sculpture, drawing, and print built from the discarded material of ordinary life. Vikki Clements, Bridget Eastman and Gemma Garley each work with what modern living leaves behind – packaging, offcuts, wrappers, the small residues that pass through a day almost unnoticed, and ask what happens when that waste is looked at closely instead of thrown away.

Across the three practices, detritus isn't simply used, but transformed: reworked into new forms, redrawn, reprinted, given a second life that has little to do with its original purpose.

There's a shared curiosity here about accumulation: how much of daily life is made of things acquired and discarded almost without thought, and what those objects might reveal about contemporary habits when they're collected, sorted, and remade by hand.

Dates: 14 August – 17 October 2025

Location: TheGallery, AUB Campus

Exhibiting artists: Shiva Balamanikandan | Mohit Bansal | Xiaoqian Chen | Jeff Hunter

Curated by Violet M. McClean, Associate Professor Rebecca Pride, Rhiannon Evans and Eden Frankham

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Dates: 30 July – 21 August 2025

Location: TheBUG Gallery, AUB Campus

Exhibiting artists: Shiva Balamanikandan | Mohit Bansal | Xiaoqian Chen | Jeff Hunter

Dates: 4–22 June 2025

Location: Lighthouse, Poole

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Date: 18 December 2024

Location: TheGallery, AUB Campus

Dates: 27 November – 7 December 2024

Location: Lighthouse, Poole

Dates: 14–20 August 2024

Location: TheGallery, AUB Campus

An exhibition and residency

Dates: 18 May – 8 June 2024

Location: The Allsop Gallery, Bridport Arts Centre, Bridport

Exhibiting artist: Lisa Moro

Dates: 8–9 March 2024

Location: The Avenue, Bournemouth

Date: 12 January 2024

Location: The Avenue, Bournemouth

Exhibiting artist: Behrooz Nematollahi

Date: 16 December 2023

Location: The Avenue, Bournemouth

Exhibiting artist: Lisa Moro

Dates: 4–8 November 2022

Location: BUMF Gallery, AUB Campus

A black-and-white poster for 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' with a close-up of rough rock above event details listing 23rd-29th August, Gather, and Poole, Dorset.

A promotional poster titled ‘WILD LIFE’ in large yellow letters over a black-and-white hand-drawn collage of handwritten phrases and sketches, with event details and AUB, MA Fine Art and lighthouse logos along the bottom.

A four-panel collage shows an older woman wearing glasses and a head-mounted device, abstract blue and beige textured material, a gold-painted block sculpture on a white surface, and a stack of colourful notebooks beside labelled strips.

A poster with a rough grey asphalt texture above an orange panel reading KIMBERLEY, Uncertain Form, MA Fine Art, AUB Arts University Bournemouth and 20th-27th May.

A hand applies red pigment to a small brown canvas on a white wall shelf, beside two other canvases with blurred markings and a yellow star-like drawing.

Two lengths of red thread hang against a plain white wall, one forming loose loops and the other draping in a long curve.

A thin red cord with frayed ends hangs against a plain light grey background.

A woman in a long patterned dress stands in a gallery beside wall-mounted textile pieces and small framed works.

Abstract poster for the MA Fine Art Cover Up exhibition, with overlapping blue and red hand-drawn loops and the title Experimental/Developmental/Unresolved on a pale background.

Poster reading 'Daily Detritus & Transformations' by Vikki Clements, Bridget Eastman and Gemma Garley, with exhibition details below on a mustard background framed by a black-and-white border.

Four pop art portraits with bold outlines on colourful backgrounds: yellow face on pink, blue face on green-yellow, green face on textured green, and orange striped face on brown.

Illustration with dark green and black shapes surrounding a central cream-coloured triangle containing a figure in shorts holding a rectangular object.

White gallery interior with colourful books on floating shelf, grey floor, recessed ceiling lights, and artwork on far wall.

Pencil sketch with scattered figures, tents, and objects arranged across beige rectangular sections on white paper background.

Collection of wooden blocks with coloured stripes in pastel blues, pinks, greens, and browns arranged on white surface.

Green gradient background with pink rectangular text block and scattered yellow squares containing artist names for MA Fine Art exhibition.

Black poster with white text advertising "In Production" postgraduate exhibition. Central textured artwork shows layered blues, greens, pinks, and browns in abstract composition.

White storage alcove filled with stacked orange Colgate boxes and scattered brown cardboard packages on red surface.

Modern gallery interior with white walls, grey carpet, recessed lighting, and contemporary artworks including sculptures and wall pieces.

Exhibition poster with circular collage of layered blue, purple and brown fragments. Large black text reads "ART FROM THE BASEMENT" over white background.

Pink hand silhouette with circuit board patterns overlaying blue background with yellow electronic traces and components.

Large machine with flashing lights claiming your perfect life awaits

Pink gradient poster with white text reading "We Would Like To Say Something..." and female symbol. Event details for International Women's Day exhibition.

Dark grey poster with large white "MIRROR" text. Abstract central image shows blurred green, white, and orange shapes with flowing, distorted elements.

Close-up of colourful ceramic fish face with large round eyes, orange and red glazed mouth opening, white text overlay advertising art exhibition.

Exhibition poster with "Oscillate" in brown text above abstract artwork featuring flowing white, beige and grey forms with red coral-like shapes.

Alumni exhibitions

Dates: 17 September – 4 October 2026 (Trinity Buoy Wharf); 27 November 2026 – 12 February 2027 (TheGallery)

Locations: Trinity Buoy Wharf, London E14 0JY; later, TheGallery, AUB Campus, before touring other UK venues until Summer 2027

Exhibiting artists: Sophie Firth | Richard Gregory

Drawings by alumni Sophie Firth and Richard Gregory have been selected for the prestigious 2026 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize. Only 92 works were selected from over 2,500 entries submitted from 48 countries worldwide.

Sophie says, “The drawing is multilayered and was made over several days as part of an attempt to slow down and notice what was right in front of me. Drawing the intricacies of each peony petal as it unfurled in silence, the flower became more fragile as it bloomed, like the layers of the paper. Each day I was immersed in its beauty, breaking down outlines as they developed a blueprint of a new form.”

Richard adds, “The drawing was made as part of Convergence: Heart Land, an exhibition about Andover, through its varied and rich history, topography and people.”

This year drawings were selected by Anita Taylor (artist, Professor of Fine Art at the University of Dundee, and founding director of the Prize), Matthew Burrows MBE (artist and founder of the Artist Support Pledge) and Sook-Kyung Lee (Director of the Whitworth and Professor of Curatorial Practices at The University of Manchester).

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Dates: 12 September 2026 – 3 January 2027

Location: Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

Exhibiting artist: Richard Gregory

Richard’s drawing, High Ground (Win Green Clump) was selected as part of the Royal West of England Academy annual open exhibition.

“Originally made for Droves & Downs, I reference the reality of this, the highest point in Cranborne Chase National landscape, in concert with histories and mythologies" Richard says. "Nature, magic, observation and sensation play together on this Wessex hilltop.”

Date: May 2026

Location: CAS, Andover

An exhibition of work by that holds a mirror to Andover, its surroundings and its people.

Date: May 2026

Location: Bridport Museum

Exhibiting artist: Carrie Mason

Short Ends takes its title from a term of the rope trade: the offcuts, remnants, and leftover lengths too short for their intended use.

Shown at Bridport Museum, in a town whose identity has for centuries been bound to rope- and net-making, Carrie Mason's exhibition speaks directly to that inheritance, working with cord, wire, and knotted line to explore what happens at the point where one length ends and another begins.

Carrie's practice sits in this space between craft and material study, treating the knot as both physical structure and metaphor. Drawing on Bridport's rope-making heritage, while working at the scale and attention of contemporary fine art, Short Ends asks what value sits in the overlooked, fragmentary and discarded.

A collaborative drawing project

Date: December 2025

Guest artist: Tom Chamberlain

Workshops: Stephen Pill, Maddison Collymore, Jinny Jehu

This drawing week invited students, alumni and staff to explore the tension between creative intuition and academic expectation. Postgraduate art and design students often experience a disconnect between the spontaneous nature of artistic practice and the structured demands of research.

Moreover, they face a difficult journey from creator-to-creator researcher that can be both intensely fearful and exciting. We're reframing these challenges as an opportunity... one that prioritises the self as a site of knowledge production.

By embracing introspection, visual thinking and embodied knowing, participants can reconnect their creative and critical identities. Through drawing not only what's seen but what's felt, questioned and discovered, research moves towards being a lived, visual and personal practice.