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Our European Fine Art Masters is a two-year, full-time programme accredited by the French art school Esä, L'ecole supérieure d'art. 

Qualification

Master of Fine Arts (MFA) research-level degree, Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique (DNSEP)

Duration

Full-time: October 2025 – June 2027

Cohort size

Up to 15 places

Teaching sessions

Tuesday and Wednesday with occasional workshops on other days

Entry requirements

BA(Hons) or relevant experience, portfolio and interview

Costs

See details below

What's included

Ongoing cumulative modules

Practical workshops with world-class tutors and practitioners

Tutorial support 

Regular one-to-ones with tutors, peer review and expert critique, small student numbers means more individual attention​

In-demand skills

Including research and analysis, entrepreneurial experience and a portfolio to take into employment or further research and practice in your field

Guest lectures and gallery visits

​Outstanding roster of visiting professionals plus discounts to public workshops, facilities and local businesses

Collaborative opportunities

Within The Margate School and Esä, community workshops, inductions and events including monthly community lunches

Internship

Ideal course to build your portfolio or network​

French Language sessions

The MA degree qualification is recognised across Europe and opens up opportunities for graduates to teach at EU universities

Self-led practice time

The schedule allows you to work part time alongside study

Modules

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Core module

Mémoire 

This module adds creative response to the traditional model of a written dissertation. Working across both years of study, students undertake a body of research that identifies, articulates and contextualises the themes within their work. 

Image: student work, 2023

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Core module

History & Philosophy of Art 

Providing a basis for research into critical discourse, this module runs across both years of study. Students are introduced to a wide range of theory related to contemporary practice including embodied learning, intersectionality, permaculture and transition arts, meta narratives, storytelling, and more. 

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Practice module

Maker & Object

In this module, we will forge narrative networks through dialogue between maker, object and environment. Drawing on the etymology of the word ‘symbol’, from the Greek symballein – ‘to put together or unite’, we will consider the ‘ancient practice of breaking a single piece of pottery in two so that a traveller, carrying one part, might be recognised on his/her return’ (Pollock, 2013, p. 22).

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Practice module

Maker & Body

Where creative themes include embodied and haptic drawing as movement, memory and presence. Sessions are based on themes of the body as societal, other, subverted, fragmented, watched, medicalised and fictionalised.

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Practice module

Maker & Print

In this module students explore the medium of print through theory and practice. Students engage in a series of specialist print-making workshops, including mono-printing, photograms and cyanotype printing as they develop their practice. You will explore the historical contexts of printmaking as a medium for artistic expression and mass communication.

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Practice module

Making Visible

This considers the expanded field of photography through the exploration of digital and analogue approaches to photographic materiality, apparatus and language leading to the production of artist's books and zines.

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Practice module

Making Digital

Where students investigate the use of digital media to create short film works. Module elements include the use of software, stop motion, compositing and computer graphics and considers speculative disciplines such as science fiction, epistemology and new writing of the image.

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Practice module

Maker of Sound

Which introduces students to sound technology, sound art, experimental music, sound and public space, sound sculpture and practices of listening.  The module includes improvised and performed approaches to sound-making and listening as practice and includes practical workshops on editing, composition, ways of combining sound and soundscape recording.

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Additional Units

These run across both years of study and include: 

 

Guest Lectures where practicing artists and researchers introduce the wider context of making in the UK and Europe.

 

French Language where students are invited to play with words, rules and structures to assess the possibility of translating and reflecting on their practice in another language.  Students analyse their own artefacts, created or otherwise, articulating the layers within their work and the possible words associated with it.

 

Internship where, with the support of TMS,  students negotiate a period of professional development in their field of study at the end of their first year.


Tutorial support with each student allocated 5 tutorials per semester in addition to regular taught modules and workshops.

Tutors

The Art Society Nature coordinator and tutors are research active practitioners and the programme is supported by a core team of regular tutors with visiting tutors joining the programme.

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Benjamin Jenner

Benjamin Jenner is an artist and practice-based researcher whose creative process is rooted in participation and dialogic exchange as a platform for the generation of collaborative forms of representation. They are particularly interested in devising techniques for allying ulterior forms of sensory perception with the embodied imagination in order to exceed empirical methods of observation and normative forms of knowledge production. 

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Amias Hanley

Through sound and spatial media, Amias Hanley explores auditory-led questions that engage the scholarship of queer ecologies and transgender studies. Central to their practice is the question of how listening processes can give rise to the experience of ecological awareness and how auditory sensations produce senses of being, place, and relationality. These inquiries are often site-responsive, generating speculative encounters that aim to offer sonic propositions for engaging composite forms and conditions.

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Rebecca Truscott-Elves

Rebecca Elves is a multidisciplinary artist making ceramic, drawn and painted beings which work to quietly repair the fabric between worlds. Selected recent exhibitions include A Siren’s Call, commissioned as part of Art in Romney Marsh (2023); Lido Open, Lido Stores, Margate (2023, selected by Charles Williams); In and Beyond Things at Limbo Arts, Margate (solo, 2023); Supple Octopus with Coral Brookes at The Tub, Hackney (2022); What I See I’ll Never Tell at Wilder Gallery, London (2021); Ghosts That Live Amongst Us (2020) at 155a Gallery and The Studio at 4 a.m. at Hastings Contemporary (2020), curated by Anne Ryan.

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Sara Trillo

Sara Trillo is a visual artist based in East Kent. She explores landscapes through research, walking, and making, seeking to uncover hidden histories of the human presence within our shared ecological environment. Her sculptural output ranges from small handheld tools to immersive installations deploying archaic making skills such as flint-napping and plant-dyeing processes. She also leads public walks which include performative sharing narratives about the mythologies of these sites. 

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Melissa Ryke

Melissa is an Australian artist. A graduate of the Schools of Fine Arts in Australia and France and of the European Post-Graduate Diploma in Art and Sound (EPAS) at the KASK in Ghent (2020), her creative research focuses on a playful and poetic investigation of everyday life and on experimentation with audiovisual installations. Using these media, she approaches the notion of bodily experience from a phenomenological angle. Her most recent projects explore the notion of 'embodied listening'; the listening, recording and broadcasting of sound as a haptic and sensory experience.

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Dominic Rose

Dominic Rose is an artist living in Margate. Working across a variety of media including photography, sculpture and found materials, his work explores the role of the artist and artwork in the era of hyper-production, as well as ideas around materials and waste.  A dual national and bilingual in French, Dominic teaches aspects of 20th century French art history and culture, with students working with print and French language. The course includes Situationism, Collapsologie and protest with work being produced in screenprint and letterpress.
Dominic is himself a graduate of the European Fine Art Masters programme at The Margate School.

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Rachel Kirk

Rachel is a Graphic Designer, Communications Consultant and Educator. She holds an MA in Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, UAL, where she now teaches Critical and Contextual Studies alongside other design modules. Rachel has a broad design and communications skillset and over fifteen years of experience working primarily with not-for-profit organisations and start-ups focusing on sustainability and socially-engaged practice. Alongside leading the Maker & Print module for European Fine Arts, Rachel

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Sława Harasymowicz

Sława Harasymowicz is an artist currently based on the East Kent coast. Her practice is largely narrative-driven and she works with drawing, moving image, different photographic and print techniques, installation, writing and sound.
 
After graduating from The Royal College of Art in London she produced a body of work responding to Sigmund Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ including a book and exhibition. She has exhibited at The National Poetry Library Southbank Centre, London, the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków, Poland, and The Freud Museum, London. In progress is a site-specific project in Germany.
She is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Harasymowicz has lectured at the Royal College of Art, UCA, and other universities in London and beyond. 

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Ian Bottle

Ian's work spans painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and artists books. He completed his MA in painting at Chelsea School of Art after studying to BA at Newcastle Polytechnic. Originally from Kent, he returned to the coast to set up a studio and work as a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in the School of Further Education at University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. Ian has continued to show work throughout his career whilst participating in a variety of research projects that have continued to shape his practice. 

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Cecilia Bonilla

Cecilia Bonilla is a multi-disciplinary visual artist working with collage, installation, assemblage and video. She completed her post-graduate studies at Chelsea College of Art and Design and now lives and works in Margate, UK. She has taught at postgraduate level in various universities including University of the Creative Arts, Farnham and Canterbury  and The University of Bedfordshire.  

Recent exhibitions include: "The Touch of Others" commissioned by The Eye Sees, Pepineire, France(2023);  Campo Art Festival, Laguna Garzon, Uruguay (2022); "Contagio" (2020), Cecilia Brunson Projects, London; "Notices in a Mutable Terrain" (2019), Piero Atchugarry gallery, Miami;  "I’ts Not Forever" (2018), Galeria del Paseo, Punta; del Este, Uruguay. Her videos have been screened at Arnolfini, Bristol (2013), at Charlie Dutton Gallery, London (2012), at EyeBeam, NY (2013), amongst others.

Image by Jessica Pamp
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Our french partnership with Esa

Offering an alternative approach to higher education, you will explore how art can be used to benefit, protect and sustain the world through a series of practical and critical modules.

The first of its kind in the UK, this Master’s qualification is part of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) and is recognised across Europe, creating opportunities to work in the EU, including teaching at EU higher education institutions.

 

Art Society Nature will give you the tools to develop a unique and personal approach in the field of contemporary creative and intellectual practice.

 

The course concludes with a presentation of the student’s final work and examination held at the Esä campus in Dunkerque, France.

Costs

Per academic year

£7,500 which includes a studio and access to TMS facilities

 

*reduced to £5,100 per academic year, if you have your own studio facilities.

French annual fee

An annual registration fee of €800 and an annual €100 fee for ësa registration and CVEC (student life and campus contribution)

Finances

We believe that your financial situation should not be a barrier to education, please get in touch by email for a conversation to discuss how we can assist: ellie@themargateschool.com

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