The Teaching Landscapes in Creative Subjects: Fine Art Area Report

Report written as part of a research project (The Pedagogy of Fine Art) exploring contemporary pedagogy and attitudes to teaching within the fine art subject area

Baggage Reclaim, some thoughts on feminism and painting

This article calls for a reappraisal of the feminist discussion around painting in relation to contemporary practices by women, suggesting that all painting by women has something to offer feminist critical thought. Playfully using Judy Chicago’s reflections and strategies as a frame, the article explores how contemporary painters have engaged with the histories and communities of women to form new models of scholar- ship and practice. It examines the projects of painters Melissa Gordon, Nadia Hebson and the Obscure Secure group (Jacqueline Utley, Hayley Field and Claudia Böse) whose artwork forms a ‘live’ response to the legacy of little known and undervalued women artists. The article concludes by examining the notion of the painterly gesture and develops a feminist context in which to examine the materiality and processes of paint- ing, with reference to the perspectives of Dana Schutz and Jutta Koether among others. It suggests Helen Molesworth’s historically defined quality of ambivalence can be seen resurfacing as a critical position within contemporary painting by women

What is Meant and what is Understood? The Role of Written Assessment Feedback in the Fine Art Subject Area

Report written as part of a research project (The Pedagogy of Fine Art) exploring contemporary pedagogy and attitudes to teaching within the fine art subject area

Introduction to symposium 'On Not Knowing; how artists think'

This one-day symposium, curated and introduced by Rebecca Fortnum, looked at the role of 'not knowing' within the creative process. The day examined how artists formulate strategies of not knowing and use the states of ignorance, doubt, block and failure within their decision making process. The state of 'not knowing' is also clearly acknowledged as an important aspect of all research, and speakers from across disciplines joined visual artists to debate these issues from a number of perspectives

Imagination of children (1): absurd impositions

Solo show. The imagination of Children is a curatorial research project developed by Rebecca Fortnum and Rhian Harris, Director of the V & A's Museum of in Bethnal Green, London. Whilst much literature appeals to children's imaginative lives this project attempts to visually examine this, both my making work about. and for, children. This first exhibition, a solo exhibition of drawings by Rebecca fortnum includes two bodies of work: ‘Dream’, an extensive series of small portraits, shows children with their eyes closed, thereby shutting out the intrusive viewer. However the iconography becomes troubling; reference may be made to Piero della Francesca’s Madonna and Child where the slumbering child foretells Christ’s death. The imagery responds directly to notions of the power relations of the subject’s gaze, introducing on asuggestive level the idea of the child’s dreams and imaginings that are inaccessible to the viewer. The portraits are completed in pairs in a process developed to question the authenticity of the single image. These small, intimate works are accompanied by large-scale drawings that initiate a different dynamic. In these the child’s gaze is unflinching, demanding even. The scale empowers the child and reflects their imposing psychological stature in relation to theadult community that surrounds them

A mind weighted with unpublished matter

Rebecca Fortnum’s A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter marks a development in the history of portraiture, raising questions about the relationship between sitter and painter, issues of authority and control as well as social attitudes around gender. Working from photographs of nineteenth-century sculptures of women, Fortnum’s source material allows for continual extended returns to elusive objects, a type of close, careful looking that leads the artist towards the depiction of every surface detail. This is a rumination on how representation is mastered; on the ‘accomplished’, intrinsically feminine status of the copy of the work of art in comparison to its ‘inventive’, ‘ingenious’ original, wrought by male hands: a critique of a value-laden history that is inherently masculine, and copying as a submissive, secretive other. Fortnum’s transcriptions strive for a form of reduplication that creates a space for difference and subtle deviations to ask what other singular likenesses might emerge through the task of copying within the legacy of women artists’ thwarted ambitions. In essence, Fortnum’s works engage with her female portraits’ sources in a conversation across time and space, through the creation of intimate and empathetic cross-temporal facsimiles that reflect the sexed connections between reproduction, training and accomplishment

I care by...

The Care research group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) was conceived in the last week of June 2020, a month after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, an act which catalysed global protests on systemic racism and police brutality. In the UK, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to show solidarity with demonstrators in the US. Coinciding with the easing of the lockdown restrictions imposed to manage the coronavirus, the marches shone a light on the government’s failure to protect Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people from the disproportionate risk posed by COVID- 19, and on the police’s increased use of stop and search in areas with large BAME populations. The pandemic has shone the harshest of lights on the question of care in the age of neoliberalism: who gets it; who needs it; who does it; who controls it. The Care research group, comprising staff and postgraduate researchers within the School of Arts and Humanities at the RCA, works in this light. Over the course of a year, as the inequalities of the virus were becoming all too clear, the group regularly came together via Zoom to reflect on: the question of how to care for the human body in the technical-patriarchal societies the virus has re-inscribed; the ‘un-doing’ of what Judith Butler describes as the binary of vulnerability and resistance; the politically-transformative potential of prioritising care (rooted in empathy, solidarity, kinship) over capitalist gain; the activation of creative research practices (including but by no means limited to writing, looking, painting, drawing, filming, performing, collecting, assembling, curating, making public) as means of caring/transforming. The group’s activities through the year of trying, failing, and trying again to care for its work and members are gathered in a co-authored Declaration of Care, published here, and expanded upon with attention to some of the methods group members developed in their research through practice. The Declaration was recited in a participatory performance with invited artist Jade Montserrat on 10 March 2021. Over the course of a two-hour webinar, participants including members of the public were invited to draw alongside Montserrat with whatever materials they had to hand as they listened to texts on the vulnerabilities of bodies, the structuring of care within institutions, and the tactile, sensory, healing qualities of creative practice. This book includes a selection of the participants’ drawings, a Reader comprising the texts that were shared, and Montserrat’s drawings created through the performance. Ahead of the performance, Montserrat delivered an address to the Care research group which looked back on a lifetime of calling for a kind of care that was never provided. Excerpts from Montserrat’s address are included here too, alongside a text and image which reflect on the group’s affective reactions to the experience of listening to it, titled Episode. The Declaration is a list of methods (approaches, processes, techniques), an enumeration of how Care research group members have worked, and would like to work: ‘I care by…’. This is a statement which has reverberated throughout the year, which bears repeating, which resounds still. Gemma Blackshaw, Care research group convenor, 2020–202

Hannah and her Sisters: loss of face in the paintings of Emma Roche

Short essay exploring the idea of the 'contemporary wince'; notions of awkwardness and embarrassment in contemporary painting. The writing focuses on how the materiality and facture of painting as well as imagery can articulate a feminist perspective on domesticity, precarity and motherhood. It was written to accompany Emma Roche's Spiders and Cheerleaders exhibition at The Complex, Dubli

Self Contained

“.. only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me.” G. Agamben, Means without End, Notes on Politics (2000) Rebecca Fortnum’s exhibition at the Freud Museum, 'Self Contained', develops several strands of her recent work on the formation of identity, dreams and the power of the gaze. The series 'Dream' depicts children with their eyes closed in paired pencil portraits. In these small, intimate works we can look at the subjects very closely but they never look back. No blinking, no flinching; we are struck by their interiority. They shut out the intrusive viewer. The imagery responds directly to notions of the power relations of the subject’s gaze, introducing on a suggestive level the ideal of the child’s dreams and imaginings that are inaccessible to the viewer. The portraits are completed in pairs in a process developed to question the authenticity of the single image. These works will be displayed in Anna Freud’s room at the Freud Museum, along with works in silverpoint, to draw out connections with Anna Freud’s writings on the child’s relationship with the adult world. The series 'Wide Shut' includes three large paired portraits, each with a veil of colour over the image. These are of older girls, one image of each pair with open eyes. They act out the duality of proper and improper, of communication and communicability, of potentiality and action. Fortnum is also exhibiting a series of letterpress works that use text fragments extracted from the governess’ monologue in 'Turn of the Screw' by Henry James. These are printed by hand, making the words materially present and isolating them from the story. The texts have been selected for the way they demonstrate the governess’ use of self-narration to form her identity. It has been suggested that Freud’s The Case of Miss Lucy R was used by James as a basis for his chilling tale. A book to accompany the exhibition will be published by RGAP, designed by Colin Sackett with essays by Graham Music, Louisa Minkin and Dr Maria Walsh. The exhibition and publication have been supported by CCW Graduate School Research Committee, University of the Arts London and The Arts Council of England

Seeing and Feeling.

I was commissioned by Betterton to contribute a chapter to a compilation of ten essays by artists and theoreticians, including writing by theorists engaged with the practice of painting as well as practitioners engaged in theory. My chapter entitled 'Seeing and Feeling' examines notions of spectatorship in relation to painting and feminism. By positing the notion of the spectator as ‘the site where the work happens', I explore the ‘choreography’ of the viewer. My account of the viewer's engagement with the paintings of Jane Harris and video and photographic works of Sam Taylor-Wood explores ‘looking as a serial activity’ that unfolds over time and is materially situated. I also raised the question of the ethical and political relations between the artist, the work and her audience. The essay was written in the context of the exhibition Unframed (funded by the Arts Council England), which was held in the Standpoint Gallery in Hoxton, London and exhibited work by the twelve UK based artists discussed in the book. The show included a range of practices that use paint and also those using other media, but which evolve from painting’s history and debates