This programme is for selected artist-practitioners with a clear sense of direction who want to engage in artistic research. With an emphasis on whanaungatanga, the programme provides a responsive and stimulating student-led environment to enable postgraduate candidates to develop their artistic and intellectual voice and make a contribution to contemporary art. Supported by the programme’s diverse peer group, effective academic supervision, reading groups, workshops, and seminars, our candidates engage in artistic research with an emphasis on studio-based making, thinking and exhibition practice. The programme is flexible, challenging and supportive. It encourages both independence and community and seeks to foster a high level of critical engagement and dialogue between candidates. Artistic research takes place in the studio or equivalent place of creative experimentation. This is where post-graduate candidates propose, develop and test methods and ideas in open and experimental ways. Taking risks, expanding one’s sense of what is possible, exploring critical-cultural frameworks and contexts, evaluating and diffracting on them in writing, making, conversation are all considered key developmental elements of artistic research within the programme.