Professor Rebecca Fortnum

Profession

Associate Dean of Research

College

Central Saint Martins

Person Type

Staff

Biography

Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer and academic. Fortnum studied at Camberwell College of Art (Foundation), Corpus Christi College, Oxford (English Literature and Language), Newcastle University (MFA) and Kingston University (PhD). She has had solo shows at the Freud Museum London, the V&A’s Museum of Childhood and, most recently, Les Praticiennes an exhibition of paintings, prints and drawings at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, exploring the lives and work of women sculptors of the Belle Époque.

She has had numerous group shows including, ‘Motherline’, Flowers East, London; ‘Sleepy Heads’, Blyth Gallery, London; ‘49.5’, 601 Art Space New York; ‘Phantom Limn’ Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. A monograph, Self Contained, was published by RGAP in 2013. In 2019 she was elected Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, where she developed her painting project, A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, culminating in a book in 2020 (Slimvolume). She was the 2021-22 Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute.

Fortnum has held an Abbey Award at the British School in Rome, individual awards from the Arts Council of England, the British Council and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation amongst others, and has received research funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her book of interviews, Contemporary British Women Artists: In Their Own Words, was published in 2007 (Bloomsbury) and On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, a book of essays that examines contemporary artists’ processes, which she co-edited with Lizzie Fisher, was published in 2013 (Black Dog). She is the Founding Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Painting published by Intellect. Her most recent book, A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, 2020 (Wiley Blackwell), co-edited with Kelly Chorpening, includes her chapter, ‘A Dirty Double Mirror: Drawing, Autobiography and Feminism’, which explores the feminist potential of the ‘autographical’ in work by Frances Stark, Emma Talbot and Nicola Tyson.

She has been a Reader in Fine Art at University of the Arts London (CCW) and a Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University and at the Royal College of Art, where she led research for the School of Arts and Humanities. She comes to Central Saint Martins from The Glasgow School of Art where she was Professor of Fine Art and Head of the School of Fine Art.

Professor Rebecca Fortnum

Biography

Central Saint Martins

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