School of Fine Art

The School of Fine Art is really vibrant at NCAD. We are full of people who feel, and come to know, that this remarkable education will meet them and that they will be changed by it. Some, when they join us, are already very culturally aware; some wish to meet and work with like minds; many want to find out what they might be capable of with support, resources and expert encouragement. There are those who did not have the chance, or the freedom, the first time around, and people who are shape-shifting their learning and life experiences with new richness. There are others who know it will meet them with contemporary energy, and we know there are people who still want to be in the band.

There are various life experiences present, and there are different cultural co-ordinates and values at play, but at stake is an interest in making things that matter to ourselves and with others, with the power to communicate in really powerful and particular ways, now and for the future.

Our questions (and sometimes answers) about different kinds of authorship, audience, space and context continue to expand our models of art practice and our areas of inquiry, and we negotiate these as fundamental strands of learning. Simultaneously, we are alert to newer and older energies and to the urgencies of our shared, remarkable, digital and material everyday lives.

In the art school we travel, near and far. We host, we encounter and we connect our learning in known and unexpected ways. This happens at undergraduate and at our tiered postgraduate levels through programme innovation and connectedness to other ways of knowing. We continue to future-fit our courses to meet changing social, cultural and economic conditions. Our professional innovations contribute to a rapidly expanding research culture in extraordinary ways.

Beautifully done, our students, proud of you… here we come again.

Professor Philip Napier
Head of the School of Fine Art