Donald Fortescue

Donald Fortescue is an artist, writer, and educator. He is a professor of art and design at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and lives and works in Oakland, California and Lutruwita/Tasmania, Australia. He was born in Sydney, Australia, where he studied zoology and botany for his first degree, and worked as a botanical consultant and scientific illustrator for many years. His love of making led him to further studies in design at the Australian National University and then to a Master’s degree in Sculpture at the University of Wollongong. He moved to the US in 1997 to head the Furniture Design program at CCA. He has exhibited in Australia, the US, Europe, Asia and South America. He received the Experimental Design Award from San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art in 2001 and his work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions.

Donald creates sculptural ‘instruments’, installations, video, sound works and images which reframe our view of the world. He is interested in revealing energies and events which are beyond our usual perception together with the human experiences and histories which underlie our understanding of the natural world. He employs a wide-range of contemporary digital technologies such as modified photographic images, video, recorded and treated sound and digital modeling and fabrication. These are used in tandem with craft-based techniques from contemporary studio craft, sculpture, seafaring, musical instrument making, and the histories of scientific discovery (including cabinet making, whittling, scrimshandering, scientific illustration, stereoscopy and the fabrication of instruments of collection, recording and display). His work highlights the rich history of human engagement with the natural world and our evolving efforts to find our place within it.

In 2019, Donald completed his Ph.D. at the Australian National University where his research focused on the congruencies between the methodologies, aspirations and limits of science and art and involved field work in the Arctic (the Svalbard Archipelago) and the Antarctic. The Antarctic project was conducted in collaboration with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole and with the support of a US National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Fellowship. Donald’s close engagement with high energy particle astrophysics is continuing in a new collaboration with the Km3NeT Neutrino Observatory in the Mediterranean Sea.