I am an artist, writer and academic. I am currently Acting Dean of C School at Central Saint Martins, where I was previously Associate Dean of Research. Before that I was Head of the School of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art and I have been a Professor of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art and at Middlesex University.
As an artist, I have 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 and received research funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
In 2019, I was Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford where I developed my project, A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, published as a book by Slimvolume in 2020. My books include Contemporary British Women Artists: In Their Own Words (2007), On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (2013, with Lizzie Fisher) and A Companion to Contemporary Drawing (2020m with Kelly Chorpening) which included my chapter, ‘A Dirty Double Mirror: Drawing, Autobiography and Feminism’, on the feminist potential of the ‘autographical’ in work by Frances Stark, Emma Talbot and Nicola Tyson.
I have exhibited at the Freud Museum London, Young V&A Museum and Compton Verney and a monograph, Self Contained, was published by RGAP in 2013. My project, Les Praticiennes, emerged from my Senior Research Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute exploring work by the women sculptors of the Paris Belle Epoque and resulted in a solo exhibition of painting, drawing and print at the Institute in 2023. In 2023, I co-convened the symposium On Not Knowing; How Artists Teach at the Glasgow School of Art in collaboration with UniArts Helsinki.
I studied at English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Fine Art at Newcastle University (MFA) and conducted post graduate research at Kingston University (PhD) and Lancaster University (Research Fellow). I was the Founding Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Painting and was instrumental in establishing Cubitt Artists and Gasworks Gallery in London in the early 90s.
Professor Rebecca Fortnum – research profile