The Engine of The New New Zealand

Art and Design

If you are creative, love a challenge and the satisfaction of coming up with new ideas that work well and look good, you should think about a career in fine arts or design.

From working in the advertising industry, to designing computer games, apps and animation, from fashion design to industrial design and web, spatial and textile design, there are heaps of exciting options.

Massey University’s College of Creative Arts (CoCA) offers the biggest range of design disciplines, programmes and papers in New Zealand.

[caption id="attachment_3206" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Fab Lab on Massey's Wellington campus contains the only 3D printer of its kind in Australasia. Check it out in action!"][/caption]

Fashion design

Would you love to work for a global fashion house? Start up your own New Zealand-based label? Or just be part of the bustling, exciting, creative industry that is fashion?

Like many creative industries, it is a pretty competitive career, but from marketing to costume design to corporate wear and merchandising there are a huge variety of areas you could go into.

Find out what kind of career you might have and how you can do it too.

Fine Arts

Massey has one of the most prestigious and innovative fine arts programmes in New Zealand.

Body Over Mind “no body never mind” Artist: Katherine Joyce-Kellaway. Katherine’s research critiques our visual and text centric world through immersive installation environments. Exploring our body’s sensory perceptual capabilities by creating new ways of experiencing the world through its somatic intelligence. (This photo: credit Jane Wilcox. Banner photos credit: Tony Kellaway).

The Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) (Hons) is a studio-based, research-led degree, and whether your interest lies in painting, sculpture, performance, sound or video, the BFA gives you the freedom to explore many different mediums and work in a truly interdisciplinary manner.

The honours programme is a research-based degree, which flows into the international-standard Master of Fine Arts (MFA). The BFA itself is a studio-based qualification.

There are three qualification options:

• Bachelor of Fine Arts
• Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)
• Master of Fine Arts

By studying the BFA, you’ll get a practical insight and the theoretical knowledge needed to develop as a contemporary artist, in small studio classes under the guidance and leadership of some of New Zealand’s top artists, art writers and curators.

In your senior year an internship elective allows you to gain work experience in organisations like Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, public and commercial dealer galleries and secondary school art departments. You are also able to choose other elective subjects during your study, including papers from Toi Atea – Māori art and design.

To apply for the Bachelor of Fine Arts, or Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) you must meet Massey’s entry criteria, and attend an interview with a portfolio of your work. The portfolio needs to contain as comprehensive a view as possible of your current achievements, potential and commitment. NOTE: You must apply before 1 October 2013 for the 2014 academic year.

After you have completed your bachelor degree, you can go on to the Master of Fine Art. A two-year full-time programme, it’s based on a leading American model. It brings together adventurous thinkers and makers across both fine art and design disciplines.  with a focus on independent advanced studio-based research.

Follow us on Twitter @TheSchoolofArt

Find out more about:

A career in fine arts
Applying to join the BFA
The MFA

Industrial Design

Do you have a bit of a flair for design? Quite keen on taking things apart and creating your own version?

William Morris, a 19^th century philosopher and artist said “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Industrial designers aim to create items that are both.

What that means is that you’ll need a mix of creativity and “practical-ness” to become an industrial designer.  It’s a fun, interesting career where you could get to design anything from chairs, computers and toasters, to parts for manufacturing and whiteware.

Find out more about what career you might have, and how to do it too.

*Design above is J Hockening’s Underwater Hockey Glove (2008) 

Photography

Jonathan Kay. ‘Into the Hadal’ series. The photographic amalgamation of history, imagination, science and exploration in the seascape. Images in banner are: Into the Halal#1, #2 and #3.

Photography is an exciting, dynamic career, with opportunities in both the artistic and commercial world.

Photography is a very versatile, in-demand skill. Many photographers are self-employed, specialising in portraiture, sports, wedding, commercial photography as in fashion, product or food photography, or in editorial photography for magazines or newspapers. Many also exhibit in public and commercial galleries. Many photographers start their professional career as a photographer’s assistant.

Massey has one of the most prestigious photography programmes in New Zealand. The Bachelor of Design at Massey  (a four-year programme) will give you a solid base of knowledge in many different areas of design and photography, from advertising, commercial, portraiture, to editorial, archival and photographic art. It will give you a broad and useful understanding of design principles that you can take into your photography career.

In your first year you will share papers from the Bachelor of Fine Arts and from the Bachelor of Design, and as you progress you are able to take other creative papers, such as from Toi Atea – Maori art and design.

You will be taught by some of New Zealand’s leading practitioners, and have access to world-class facilities such as professional photographic studios, state-of-the-art digital suites/printers , film and digital technologies, black and white/alternative process darkrooms, access to photographic equipment from medium format, 4x 5, professional 35mm digital cameras to portable lighting kits and talented technical teams.

As photographers are often self-employed, being employed on contracts to companies, it is important to build up your knowledge of marketing and business skills to enable you to get the jobs you’d like.

To apply for the Bachelor of Design (Hons) you must meet Massey’s entry criteria, and submit a portfolio of your work.

There are no specific subject requirements to enter the programme, but art, computer studies, graphic design, maths and English are school subjects that will help you start to develop the right skills.

Apply before 1 October 2013 for the 2014 year.

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Spatial design

If you’ve ever been to Te Papa, you’ve seen how the museum stands out from the buildings around it.

Dorita Hanna and Nick Kapica’s work, centrally-displayed at the Prague Quadriennal in 2010.

That continues when you walk inside; Te Papa is like no other place in New Zealand. It’s a great example of how spatial design can influence the way we feel.

Spatial design deals with a wide range of spaces and events you might encounter every day. This can be almost anything – the interior of a commercial building, public building, home, or mode of transport, or an exhibition stand, theatre set, or a single piece of furniture.

Well-considered spatial design requires an awareness of visual culture and the world around us. You need a keen focus on the creation and manipulation of places and spaces where people play out their daily lives, desires, and social encounters. Integrating space, lighting, and technology with human habitation, spatial design combines real-world requirements (you shouldn’t see the urinals when you open the door to the men’s loo) with poetic ideas (the counters in the loo should look like Italian marble instead of dull old tile).

Good spatial design can improve the quality of our lives, enrich our culture and national identity, and strongly contribute to a business’s success.

Spatial designers don’t just design interior spaces in the real world, either. They’re increasingly becoming an essential part of teams responsible for building the worlds in the latest 3D video games. The idea of designing a space with a proper “flow” to it is arguably just as important in modern gaming as it is in the physical spaces we move through.

Find out what career you might have, and how you can do it too.

Visual Communication Design

Nature’s Design Influence – a project from Shannon Bayliss investigating nature’s influence in design by exploring principles and techniques for incorporating nature into the design process.

The visual communication designer is in charge of how we perceive our world.

That’s because Visual Communication is the most natural and instinctive way that humans interact with their environment.

Visual communicators present the information we read, look at, learn from, laugh from and use to navigate through our day. This may be in the form of books, illustrations, concept art, signage, animations, web pages, games, mobile apps, advertising, marketing, branding …. in fact any form of visual communication goes through the eyes and hands of a designer.

So this quite a big responsibility … and it is also enormous fun! The way you design, and the way you present the visual language, affects how it is read and perceived. In the School of Design you will learn this language, so that you too can affect the visual language of our world, and maybe even make the world a slightly better place through good design.

Find out more about what career you could have, and how you can do it too.

Other art and design

Massey’s College of Creative Arts has a buzz about it.

That’s not only because it’s where many of New Zealand’s most-successful designers and fine artists began their careers. It is a place where you mix with other passionate and art and design-obsessed students, where you can be creative with your non-conformist ideas, where you are valued for the independent development and expression of your ideas and where you are taught by artists, designers and academics who are in touch with design and art companies and employers.

There are two types of disciplines – Design and Fine Arts.

• Design involves creating designs usually for a commercial requirement – things like photography, fashion, web sites and gaming.
• Fine Arts involves ‘cutting-edge’ outputs like mixed-media, digital and live performance and traditional arts like painting and sculpture.

Download Your 2013 Guide to Creative Arts at Massey.