‘A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter’ by Rebecca Fortnum
Following her time as the first holder of the College's Visiting Research Fellowship in the Creative Arts, Professor Rebecca Fortnum has published A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, incorporating many of the paintings she created during her tenure at Merton. The book discusses the wider historical and social implications of female representation, raising questions about the relationship between sitter and painter, and issues of authority and control, as well as attitudes around gender.
Whilst at Merton, Rebecca worked from photographs of 19th-century sculptures of women, some of them from the Ashmolean Museum's collections, to create a series of works - or 'transcriptions' - that "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."
Until the second lockdown in England necessitated its temporary closure, two paintings from the sequence were being exhibited in the Royal Academy’s belated Summer Exhibition 2020, in Academician Sonia Boyce's room.
Rebecca also has ten paintings currently on show at Gallery 601 Artspace in New York, in a show called 49.5, which explores the question of why "we, as a society, still seem to have so much trouble envisioning and supporting women in power". The exhibition runs until the end of January 2021.
