Sheffield Hallam University’s BA Fine Art course encourages and supports students to develop their own creative approach to contemporary art practice by harnessing their curiosity, imagination and inventiveness to explore diverse ideas and possibilities.
Inspired by Sheffield’s metalwork heritage, historic cutlery industry and cast bronze public sculpture, our students have had the opportunity to work with wax, digital fabrication processes, and organic materials to create cast bronze maquette sculpture in the University’s Foundry. Located in Sheaf workshops, the Foundry offers students an exceptional opportunity to develop their skills and ideas in metal. It is one of the few remaining sculptural foundries in a UK higher education context and is
supported by academics and our colleagues from TORS (Technical, Operations and Resources Services) who offer their knowledge and experience to enable our emerging artists to produce new work.
Artists and sculptors will often produce a series of smaller-scale preliminary models and 3D ‘sketches’ called maquettes. Maquettes enable sculptors to test a wide range of ideas and to present them to a potential commissioner or client
before scaling them up to create larger artworks for galleries and public spaces. Sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) and Henry Moore (1898-1986) worked in this way, creating maquettes in a variety of materials to explore their
ideas, processes and techniques.