The Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, has hosted collaborations and events involving researchers from many different fields from the Slade and UCL, as well as from the wider community, both national and international. One of the aims of the Slade Research Centre is to encourage and teach students to create artworks of the highest quality, to help them develop and achieve their ambitions as artists, and in so doing to engage in artistic research at the highest level. The Slade Research Centre is used by all our programmes, including undergraduate, graduate and doctorate.

Graduate Research Weeks are held at the Slade Research Centre and provide MFA and MA students across all three areas, Painting, Sculpture and Fine Art Media, the opportunity to explore an aspect of their work under a particular research theme, which can be imaginatively developed in the unique studio space of the Centre. The research themes involve basic notions that continually inform the activity of art-making, and hence are key to the development of artistic research. The research themes this academic year were:

Drawing
Colour
Big
Body

The continual conversation of Fine Art with design, architecture, fashion, and the development of culture and its related industries is often overlooked. Much of what we see around us has been made by someone who went to art school, often working with experts in other fields. The Slade Research Centre and Graduate Research Weeks support emerging artists in providing a forum to help construct the thinking which will allow them to engage positively with other disciplines. In light of exploring the constant themes that run through artistic practice, related questions and ideas shift and change. Context and materials change too, and through this dynamic, artists bring new questions and answers to the fore, interrogating familiar issues in new and different ways. Art school, and one situated in one of the world’s great research universities, is here to explore and question existing paradigms, foster innovative research and enable new approaches to thinking and making.

This e-publication represents a selection of the work of MFA and MA students who participated in one or more of this year’s Graduate Research Weeks. It demonstrates a range of experimentation, collaboration and discussion, and reflects the spirit of ambition and enthusiasm that has energised the programme. We would like to thank everyone involved, the students and staff within both the Slade and UCL, as well as the artists and researchers from outside the university who have engaged in our debates and given so generously of their time and expertise to help us achieve our aims. A very special thanks goes to Professor Christopher Dean of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and Dr. Wendy Birch of Anatomy & Developmental Biology in their support of Body Week. Students benefitted enormously from drawing sessions in the Dissection Room of the Anatomy Department, an initiative spearheaded by Professor Edward Allington.

Jayne Parker, Head of Fine Art Media, Director of Graduate Studies
Lisa Milroy, Head of Graduate Painting
Professor Edward Allington, Head of Graduate Sculpture

Graduate Research 2013 publication