After your studies
Further Studies
For further information on courses Tel: +44(0)121 331 5595 or go direct to the courses section of the website.
Employment Opportunities
Students graduating from the course are resourceful and versatile, extending their skills across a wide range of post-Master’s opportunities. While a number of students progress to PhD research at both Birmingham City University and a number of other prestigious institutions many of our alumni develop their careers as highly successful professional artists working both individually and collaboratively around the world.
Our Alumni
A selection of our alumni:
Andrew Hunt, Director of Focal Point Gallery, Southend on Sea, UK
Andrew was previously curator of International Project Space, Birmingham, UK and assistant curator at Norwich Gallery, UK. He regularly organises independent projects. Freelance exhibitions include The Affirmation, Chelsea Space (2007), Writing in Strobe, Dicksmith Gallery (2006) and Like Beads on an Abacus Designed to Calculate Infinity, Rockwell (2004). Publishing activities include the imprint Slimvolume, produced on a yearly basis since 2001. He is also reviews editor at Untitled, a regular contributor to Frieze, Art Monthly and a number of other journals. He is currently editing three books about contemporary art criticism collectively titled Laboratory of Synthesis with the critic Robert Garnett, to be published by Book Works during 2008 and 2009.
Heather Morison and Ivan Morison
Heather and Ivan exhibit internationally – here is a selection of their solo exhibitions and projects:
2010
An Unreachable Country. A Long Way to Go, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth
Frost King, Open Satellite, Seattle, USA
Mr. Clevver, ongoing project commissioned by Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Queenstown, Tasmania, AU
2009
Falling Into Place, published by Bookworks, London and Situations, UWE, Bristol
The Black Line, Void, Derry, Northern Ireland
The Shape of Things to Come, Situations, University of West of England, Bristol
I hate her. I hate her., VOLTA NY with Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, New York
Black Dog Times, produced in collaboration with Full Beam Visual Theatre, Bristol
2008
How to Survive (The Bad Years), Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto
The Opposite of all those Things, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool
2007
And so it goes, Representing Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennale 2007, with Merlin James and Richard Deacon, touring to Oriel Davies, Newtown and Chapter, Cardiff
The Land of Cockaigne, Bloomberg Space, London
James and Eleanor Avery
James and Eleanor are based in Sydney and exhibit internationally:
Excerpt from Claire Lewis’s ‘Eleanor and James Avery: Our Day Out’:
“The multiple and shifting manifestations of the contemporary ‘landscape’ form a fertile site for the critique of perception and reality in the work of Eleanor and James Avery. Their improbable towers of makeshift props and brazen monuments to the interventions of tourism offer us a parallel environment, constructed from artificial reproductions of natural phenomena. Although the material constituents of these unruly dioramas are familiar - a cable car, a mountain vista, a sightseeing tour or souvenirs, they remain symbols on the periphery of our conventional understanding of those entities. In the crude artifice of these synthetic landscapes we recognise the commodified, passive devices which shape our understanding of the ‘real’, opening up complex questions about the validity of how we experience and consume the natural world.”
Elizabeth Rowe
Excerpt from Pen Dalton’s ‘My Sponsor is the Leader of the Country’:
“Elizabeth Rowe works on the surface, and on the surface what we see is colour, pattern, repetition, images from the everyday: the popular magazine, advertising, the consumer catalogue. The work is about confusion, choice and how sense is made out of multifarious experience. The early work exemplified in Suburban Summer 2003 arose from the notion of subjectivity as a combinatory process, as continually emergent distributed in other things, in other people, in other practices. The collaging of disparate, highly coloured printed material, having both global and intimate references into continuous surfaces in Rowe’s work, reiterates the work of shaping selfhood. The images work as analogy for the vastly complex combinatory ethical and aesthetic relations we have and how we tell those relations of the self to the self: the selection of the best bits: the physical process of cutting-out and discarding those that don’t fit; the juxtaposition of contradictory elements of time, scale and printed syntax; allowing each image to have its say in relation to the other yet with some kind of ego: a different kind of ego emerging. The formal decisions of arrangement, sequencing, priority and framing all mimic the always becoming and creative processes of subjectivity.”
Solo Exhibitions:
- 2009:‘If distance was an object between us.’ Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam, NL.
- 2008:‘Tiny Details Grotesque Proportions.’ The New Art Gallery Walsall, West Midlands.
- 2006:‘My Sponsor is the Leader of the Country.’ MAC, Birmingham.
- 2004:‘Autonomy, Homogenisation, Categorisation, Choice.’ RAID Projects. Los Angeles. USA.
Feng Ru Lee - Winner of the prestigious Taipei Prize in 2000
Feng-Ru Lee’s practice is rooted in her Far-East Asian Cultural background her work crosses a range of different media and often-incorporates video, two dimensional works, performance and installation. Toying with ideas of mass production and genetic engineering, Lee’s practice is often seen as both a critique and an attempt to understand the seemingly controversial issues involved in the state of the contemporary human condition. Lee explores ideas that centre on the status of the transition/ migration between cultures and humanity, whilst also addressing notions of the materialisation of objects and beings. Subjects, such as Eastern philosophy and Western science that seem immediately differential, hold intrinsically deep and thought provoking issues for both the artist and viewer. Lee has exhibited throughout the UK, Taiwan and internationally including the USA, Middle East, Japan, and across Europe. In 2001 she represented Taipei, Taiwan in an artist residency programme between Taipei and Jerusalem. Lee has also completed residencies in Berlin and recently at the New Art Gallery Walsall.
Recent exhibitions have included:
- Flux Fest at VIVID, Birmingham,
- Jam: Cultural Congestions in Contemporary Asian Art at South Hills Park
- Shift Time - The Festival of Ideas in Shrewsbury
- Solo Exhibition at Entrance Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic.
Faye has an MA Fine Art distinction from Birmingham City University and has had 13 solo shows. Her numerous commissions and awards include work for the Photographers’ Gallery and the New Art Gallery Walsall, in addition to being shortlisted for the Helen Chadwick Fellowship with the British School in Rome. She has also worked internationally with exhibitions in Greece and France and a residency in the Czech Republic. In 2010 she was in group exhibitions with Cindy Sherman, Glenn Brown and Gillian Wearing, building on her 2009 solo exhibition at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, which won the accolade of Time Out London Exhibition of the Week.
Yoko predominantly works in oil on canvas and in commission basis, on MDF. She originally intended to learn Japanese Traditional Painting and practiced with traditional Japanese pigment, it still influence current practice. She completed MA Fine Art course at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in 1999. She now lives and works in London. She has exhibited widely in the UK and Japan since 1995.
Other alumni successes
View a selection of our graduates' work:
Christopher Hodson – XYZ, a collaboration with Sarah Staton - Commissioned by Site Gallery, Sheffield, May 2011
Greg Cox
David Culshaw
Mark S Gubb
Anne Guest
Joe Hallam - (Artist) in Nottingham (UK) from Re-title.com
Neil Jones - Saatchi Online Artist Profile
Jonathan Kelham
Liu Diqui
Alfreda McHale
Sarah Maurice-Smith
David Miller - Grand Union
Nicole Mortiboys
Andrew M. Parker - Digbeth is Good
Mark Parkinson
Stuart Tait
Matt Westbrook - Grand Union