BA (Hons) Fine Art

Sarah King is an artist, educator and researcher, and Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for BA (Hons) Fine Art at Arts University Plymouth. Her practice explores relationships between memory, materials and place, with particular attention to care, repair, loss and the more-than-human. Drawing on folklore, ritual and the uncanny, she considers how objects carry traces of lives and landscapes, and how making can become a way of attending to fragile or overlooked things. Sarah works across sculpture, assemblage, textiles, drawing, photography, and performance. Her processes include walking, gathering, observing, wrapping, stitching and arranging. Often working with organic and salvaged materials, she creates objects that suggest relics, domestic forms or speculative tools. These works bring material memory into conversation with imagined possibilities for tending to and mending the impossible. Sustained engagement with place is central to Sarah’s research. Repeated visits to coastal landscapes inform her exploration of memory, folklore, thresholds and more-than-human relationships. Walking, gathering and close observation shape her material processes. Her assemblages consider what materials retain and how they might invite acts of care. Her research project The Lost Object developed through gathering, caring for and transforming materials, exploring their relationship to absence, vulnerability and loss. The project has been shared through exhibitions and performance-lectures, including presentations at Richmond Art Gallery and the Annual Art History Conference at the University of York. She exhibits nationally and internationally and has work held in private collections in the UK and US. Sarah co-convenes Arts University Plymouth’s Memory, Site & Artefact Research Group and is a member of LAND2. She leads the Fine Art degree and teaches across year1 and year3 and contributes to MA teaching, supporting students to develop connections between experimentation, critical enquiry and their individual practices. Her teaching centres on the studio as a place for making, sharing, questioning and learning through dialogue. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and External Examiner for Glasgow School of Art.

Dr Laura Hopes is an artist, writer, researcher and lecturer on BA (Hons) Fine Art at Arts University Plymouth. Her work looks at relationships between people and land, and at how agriculture, extraction, industry and colonisation continue to shape places in a changing climate. Laura works across sculpture, installation, film, sound, performance, writing and participation. She often starts with agricultural by-products, industrial structures, found archives or knowledge held by people with long experience of a place. Collaboration is central to her practice. She describes herself as a “vulnerable practitioner”: open to uncertainty, failure and to other people changing the direction of the work. For Functional Disobedience: A Vow for Nature, commissioned for Remember Nature 2025, Laura worked with children from High Street Primary Academy. Together they built structures from wooden scaffolding poles and reclaimed clamps, exploring how urban trees are noticed and protected as the city changes. The work was shown at KARST in Plymouth. An accompanying call-to-action film was screened at Tate Modern. Her 2026 solo installation PORTALS at Traction Project Space in Exeter drew on Cornish mining landscapes and remnants from a thatched farm on the north coast to consider extraction, migration, waste and what places retain. For Let’s SEA Your Tatts, made with LOW PROFILE, she helped gather the stories behind nearly 300 maritime tattoos. The project resulted in three film-poems, a temporary tattoo parlour and a public sharing event for Plymouth’s Sea for Yourself programme. In 2026, Laura was selected for The Cornwall Workshop at Kestle Barton and received an a-n Artists’ Bursary for 2025–26. She is a member of the artist collective Still Moving, a studio holder at KARST and Creative Network Lead for the Creative Coastal Communities Network and Programme at Take A Part. Before joining Arts University Plymouth, Laura taught Fine Art and Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Plymouth from 2020 to 2025 as an Associate Lecturer, Module Lead and Stage Lead. She holds a PhD titled Being Vulnerable: Distances of the Sublime Anthropocene, an MA with Distinction in Contemporary Arts Practice and a first-class BA (Hons) Fine Art. Her earlier qualifications include a PGCE in Primary Education and a BA (Hons) African Studies from SOAS.

Monika Rycerz is an educator and printmaker. Her work is inspired by human condition, observations from the process and the unexpected. She champions a collaborative approach to work and brings this aspect to her own practice whenever possible.Monika trained in the UK and USA. She completed a BA in Surface Design at London College of Communication in 2009 and spent a semester at the University of Connecticut. In 2015 she graduated from the MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking at the University of the West of England, where she was awarded the Agassi Book Arts Prize for her installation 'Everyone dreams'. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally - including in the USA, China and Greece. Her current practice is based around working on socially engaging projects with local communities. She has led and run creative workshops and projects for disadvantaged adults in Plymouth and Bristol, focusing on collaboration and participation. Her interdisciplinary approach to work incorporates traditional and digital printmaking processes leading to hybrid prints and one-off room installations. She is interested in materials and challenging the process, and encourages experimentation and innovation. Monika currently teaches on our BA (Hons) Painting, Drawing & Printmaking and BA (Hons) Fine Art courses.

In his role as a Technical Tutor at Arts University Plymouth, Paul offers support and assistance to students with the practical application of their subject and contributes to a positive overall student experience by ensuring that a safe working environment is achieved within the Fine Art department, also supporting and teaching students on our Painting, Drawing & Printmaking and Craft & Material Practices degrees. Since graduating from BA (Hons) Fine Art at Arts University Plymouth in 2014, Paul has worked as a freelance gallery technician in Plymouth and across the South West. While working as a technician he studied for a Masters qualification in Fine Art, graduating in October 2018. Paul has held a studio at KARST in Plymouth for three years, working to develop his practice which focuses on the design and production of sculptural forms, exploring the interaction between viewer, spatial dimensions and fortified structures. Scale and connectivity are key considerations, with current research exploring principles and technologies that unify sculpture, with space to produce immersive works that provide potential for increased accessibility and audience participation.