<p>Each year the MA program spends a long weekend at Rame Projects and the adjacent campsite at Maker Heights near Millbrook in Cornwall. Located in old army barracks, <a href="https://rameprojects.com/">Rame Projects</a> is an artist-led organisation dedicated to testing out new ideas, and the South East Cornwall’s only contemporary visual arts offering. Situated at an amazing cliff-top location, the project space and its programme of residencies, workshops, and performances give local, regional and tourist audiences an opportunity to engage with artworks and art-making in a rural setting. These reflect on the inspiring site of Rame Head, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, its varied histories and ecologies. The programme supports artists without previous significant support who are ambitious in making experimental work located in the far South West.</p>

<p dir="ltr">For the Masters students at Arts University Plymouth, the weekend residency is an opportunity to step away from their studies after a busy submission period, look back at the city of Plymouth across The Sound, to camp, eat together, and play with materials and ideas. Each year the students are invited to propose workshops, this could either be a skill that they have and would like to teach to others, or an experiment with materials or concepts that they’d like to try out. Students are encouraged to come up with ideas that in one way or another respond to the cultural heritage or ecology of the Makers Height. A committee made up of postgraduate staff, the curators at Rame Projects and Masters students select a number of proposals. Rame Projects then proposes a couple of artists that they have been working with, to come in to do a performance or workshop.<br /></p>

<p dir="ltr">The past has featured artists such <a href="https://rameprojects.com/huhtamaki-wab/">Huhtamaki Wab</a> and <a href="https://www.zethumaseko.com/">Zeth Maseko</a> joining the cohort for the weekend. This year staff and students were visited by <a href="https://www.rhysmorganartist.com/">Rhys Morgan</a>’s LGBTQIA+ sea shanty choir ‘<em>Seaweed in the Fruit Locker’</em> for a convivial fireside performance. </p> <p dir="ltr">This year campers made large willow sculptures guided by <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/ma-ceramics">MA Ceramics</a> student Lorraine Gilroy, ‘patterned the landscape’ with MA Creative Education student and textile artist Hannah Jordan, and Katherine Anstead, studying a <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/master-of-fine-art-mfa">Masters in Fine Art</a>, led through a process of making hand-held mini sculptures from natural materials found on site.<br /></p>

<p dir="ltr">With Rame Head being a 15 minute walk to the beach, if you take the right path down through the woodland, a sense of dreamy contemplation descends upon the group through a sense of temporal embodiment in the landscape. What has been remarked upon as ‘maker’s time’, a shifting down in gear to the slower, more present, sense of being; means that the weekend is both a break and a joyful opportunity to learn something new.</p> <p dir="ltr">The dynamic, cross-disciplinary postgraduate community at Arts University Plymouth offers a rich environment that provides critical and technical expertise in a range of disciplines. The community of postgraduate students develop exposure within their field and refine their practice in a space that fosters experimentation and reflective engagement with issues that are shaping the world we hold in common. <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/study/postgraduate">Find out more about postgraduate study at Arts University Plymouth on our website.</a><br /></p>