MA ART and environment

  About

The  MA Art and Environment (MAAE) uniquely combines post-studio art practice, interdisciplinary research, virtual teaching, Island Studies and community engagement.  Taking contemporary art’s relationship with environments (ecological, spatial, political, economic) as its object of study, the MAAE instructs students in artistic practices shaped by ‘archipelagic thinking’ (a decolonial spatial discourse that emphasises relationality and locality) and a pedagogy that is world-centred. A World-centred education is orientated towards ‘events’ in the world and the responses that they provoke in students and teachers.

Located in the West Cork Archipelago and the West Cork Arts Centre (Uillinn) the MAAE is supported by a team of artists, lecturers, and researchers in the Dublin School of Art and Design (TU Dublin), by community workers and technicians in the Sherkin Island Development Society (SIDS) and by an international, interdisciplinary network of peers and colleagues. 

*Image: Insiders Perspective.Mona O Driscoll. 2018

Dublin School of Art and Design

The MAAE faculty is comprised of practising artists, academics, critics, curators and community workers who cover the whole spectrum of environmental art practice and community art-related knowledge. We are actively involved in the contemporary cultural scene as organisers, makers and commentators. The MAAE is supported by a programme of visiting lecturer’s from the Dublin School of Art and Design, including Jesse Jones, Barbara Knezevic, Dr. Brian Fay, Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick, Dr. Mark Garry, Dr.Connell Vaughan and Dr.Mick O Hara (staff profiles here). The course coordinator is Dr. Glenn Loughran.

Dr GLENN LOUGHRAN: MAAE Programme Chair

Glenn Loughran is an Artist and Lecturer in Fine Art at the Dublin School of Art and Design at the Technological University Dublin. He is the course coordinator of the BA in Visual Art on Sherkin Island and Head of Artistic Research in the Graduate School of Creative Arts (GradCAM). He has presented internationally on Artistic Research, Socially Engaged Art, Pedagogy and Island studies.

  Curriculum

The MAAE has a unique, three part curriculum focused on  Mapping, Sensing, and Hacking. Where Mapping gathers historical and empirical knowledge, Sensing promotes sensorial and aesthetic engagement with materials, systems, and environments. Hacking then encourages imaginative, site-specific interventions (or ‘hacks’) that excavate, repurpose, or recompose elements of the environment.  With long distance learning central to the archipelagic reach of the course, virtual learning and in particular virtual environments are also an aspect of study on the course.

  MAPPINg THE ENVIRONMENT

(25 ECTS)

Themes 

Histories and Theories of Environment

• Environmental Humanities 

• Cognitive Mapping

• Island Studies I

• Interdisciplinary practice

Delivery / lectures (on-site and virtual), workshops, projects, curatorial programme.

Mapping the Environment introduces students to the themes, debates, and conceptual frameworks that have shaped environmental arts over the past fifty years. It explores aesthetic, social, and political intersections between art and other fields and disciplines: biological and earth sciences, anthropology, design, education, and political activism. In addition, students learn techniques of deep mapping and other diagrammatic methodologies to cognitively map local environments across the West Cork archipelago.

  Sensing THE ENVIRONMENT

(25 ECTS)

Themes:

• Artistic Research 

• Eco-Socially Engaged Art 

• Environmental Fieldwork and Citizen Science 

• Island Studies II 

• Informal Pedagogies

Sensing the Environment will support students to develop expanded artistic research projects within local environments and communities. Focusing on archipelagic fieldwork, students will record, measure, analyse, and sense local environments. Such fieldwork is essential to an expanded art practices that engages with human and non-human actors. Lectures on artistic research, island studies, public pedagogy and socially engaged arts will support this fieldwork.

  Hacking the environment

(40 ECTS) 

Themes:

• Event Studies

• Hacking as Acting 

• Hacking as Adapting 

• Project Management 

• Project Realisation 

Delivery / lectures, community engagement, fieldwork, project management, project realisation. 

Hacking the Environment will synthesise the work developed in modules 1 & 2 through a large-scale project. It will support students to conceive, manage, and deliver a final project that intervenes and ‘hacks’ a local environment. This module will be facilitated by members of the island communities, SIDS and UILLINN.

News

Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre
Monday 25th November
2 pm.
www.meshworking.eu

At a time when our earth systems and political frameworks are so volatile and chaotic, this year’s MA Art and Environment Graduate exhibition gives form to our collective environmental experience, reflecting on bodies of water, oceanic thinking, intersectionality, relational entanglements and war.

Showcasing the work of TU Dublin graduates – Dianne Curtin, D. Martins, Terry Farnell, Hina Khan, Niamh Seana Meehan, Niamh Ní Chearbhaill and Fiona Hayes, the exhibition captures the urgencies and intensities of life and living through climate change.

Guest speakers include:

·     Dr Orla McDonagh, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, TU Dublin.
·     Judith Gilbert, Project Officer, Comhar na nOileán.

APPLY

• Open for applications from: January 1st / 2025

• Applications submitted to: MA ART & ENVIRONMENT

• For further information please contact Programme Director: Dr Glenn Loughran at glenn.loughran@tudublin.ie

*Image: Salvage X. 2018. Catch Keeley