Dr Sarah Fortais is a Canadian artist and researcher interested in bricolage: disassembling, repurposing, and modifying existing objects or ideas to generate new understanding. Fortais received a PhD in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art (2018), where she built spacesuits for animals, borrowed NASA moon rocks, and created strategies to define what it means to call a person or thing ‘cool’. Fortais also created an Apollo A5-L pressure suit from materials sourced from the streets of London and produced a performative mission series, including ‘Voyageur’ (with Nikolas Ventourakis) for, Hors Pistes: La lune: Zone Imaginaire à Défendre, in the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2019). She received the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize and the Westbury Arts Centre Graduate Residency (Milton Keynes) in 2016 and was the first Artist in Residence at the Centre for Outer Space Studies, UCL in 2022. Currently, Fortais is the Director of Art at Space Health Research.

sarahfortais.com | Space Health Research | PhD thesis

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FIELDWORK Q&A – April 2020

How is fieldwork part of your practice?
Practically speaking, most of the materials for my sculptures come from performances in the field. Since I’m usually wearing a spacesuit that I also made from found materials, I refer to my performances as missions. My missions involve a simple activity, like getting a cup of coffee, which becomes complicated through human interactions and finding interesting disused objects along the way. Once back in my studio, I use my found materials to build items like spacesuits for animals.

How would you describe your fieldwork activity?
Part performance, part research, and very pragmatic due to the limitations of wearing my spacesuit.

How are you currently sharing your fieldwork?
Collecting materials usually becomes a type of performance where I interact with, and am observed by people. My resulting sculptures are then exhibited in galleries, usually alongside an ongoing performance where I return to the gallery with new materials and continue to build sculptures. I occasionally write about my creative methodology, with the largest piece of writing being my Practice-Led PhD thesis, titled Defining Cool Through A Bricoleur’s Studio Practice, which I completed in 2018.

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