
BA (Hons) Painting, Drawing & Printmaking
Our stimulating degree courses are delivered by our team of academics, technical demonstrators and invited experts who together deliver excellence in teaching. You’ll learn from real industry professionals, to ensure your future success in the fast-paced creative industries.
Dr Eve Ess
Senior Lecturer & Course Leader
Eve’s work forms unstable connections between personal and historical details, embodied experience and emotional states of mind. Eve's oil paintings are materially led and stylistically variable. Maintained as storage devices, they are reorganised over time and used to generate associated imagery, objects, and texts.
Recent research explores the bodily and temporal distortions of 'looking after', particularly in relation to end-of-life care, observational drawing, and intergenerational confusion. Works from We die from the outside in are characterised by slippage and porosity across analogue and digital media, and modes of publication, from screen prints to sound works. Eve’s talk, Instants in Withdrawing, first delivered in 2023 for the Drawing Research Forum, Drawing Room, London, extends ideas around care, liveness, and labour from Because we love it so much, a script Eve wrote and performed for a Writing Residency with Contemporary Arts Membership Plymouth (CAMP), in 2020.
Eve is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for BA (Hons) Painting, Drawing, & Printmaking at Arts University Plymouth. Before joining Arts University Plymouth, Eve taught across Fine Art programmes at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where she was MFA course leader for two years. As an artist educator, Eve has worked with organisations such as the Slade, Chisenhale Gallery, and Tate, contributing to the research project and book In Site of Conversation (Tate Publishing, 2017) which includes her writing on ((not-artist)) pedagogy. A PhD by practice in Painting at the Royal College of Art 2009-14 took Dora Maar's drained copy of Weeping Woman (1937) as a guide to researching aposiopetic gestures and ambivalent modes of study, with reference to feminist lessons and psychoanalytic theory.
Monika Rycerz
Lecturer
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 across all levels of our BA (Hons) Painting, Drawing & Printmaking programme.
Robert Manners
Lecturer
Robert’s practice moves fluidly between disciplines and has consistently explored and exploited common perceptions of where boundaries between painting, printmaking and drawing begin and end. Studying Mural Design at Chelsea School of Art laid the foundations for a cross-disciplinary practice. A twelve-year hiatus running a successful ceramic tile design and manufacturing company was followed by the completion of an MA in Multi-disciplinary Printmaking at the University of West of England.
Painting has always been central to Robert’s practice but this has been significantly influenced by the disciplines and processes of printmaking and collage. Robert’s studio outputs reflect a deep interest in the materiality and physicality of the work itself whilst simultaneously investigating themes of authenticity and modes of understood painting ‘styles’ (the abstract and the representational). Close observation of the materiality of these all these disciplines remains an integral component of his practice. Robert is also actively involved in a number of artist-led organisations and has worked as a curator on a number of arts establishment funded projects in Bristol and in the South West.
Current lines of research at Arts University Plymouth are scrutinising recurring themes in his practice. These include questions of authenticity, the use of the readymade (and its influence in the context of modernist and contemporary painting) and boundaries between abstract and representational modes of painting.


