School of Fine Art

It is a brilliant time of year in the art school calendar. Fine Art is vibrant and of full of people who prosper in relation to each other. Learning is a particularly shared matter, and that is something so intrinsic to a fine art education that sometimes we can just assume that all learning is like this, rather than see it every day, for the remarkable learning environment that it is, where all kinds of invention is possible.

There is complexity in this of course, made of activity, research, discovery, criticality and participation. Further skills of visualising, planning, marshalling resources and executing art work are live—making with people, making in relation to people, making decisions and making good is an expanding field of capacities, imaginations and knowing, that we can take for granted.

Our efforts to be alert to different propositions at play and at stake has further urgency as we reflect again on the kinds of world building that is part of how our students and alumni create, share and platform, co-created, collaborative and individual visions. Propositions that consider known and alternative futures, worlds and energies.

Our work at postgraduate level through the micro credentials of the Creative Futures Academy (CFA) is further framing creative potentials in areas of Art and Health, Art and Ecology, Creative Hospitality and MA/MFA scholarship in Art and Social Action. We are generating further MA /MFA propositions through named pathway models—(a shout out to our MFA Fine art students showing at the great Rua Red this year.) The M.Res through Fine Art offers another model of navigating postgraduate practice-based co-ordinates through a tutorial model. These represent a growing suite of agile offers responding to our shape-shifting landscape.

A word of course to say really well done to our students. They know that making art that really communicates with any depth is hard work—congratulations on your achievements.

I hope that you delve into the spectrum and spectacle of NCAD Works 2025.

...Enjoy the show

Professor Philip Napier
Head of the School of Fine Art