Fortin’s practice engages with materiality, process and colour to reveal the complex relationships among human activity, non-living things and the ecologies that shape our world. She works in situ—with forms and sites, such as cars, trees, an arboretum and a wrecking yard. Her process involves imprinting residues of the past that influence the shifting conditions of the future. Using reclaimed fabrics, foraged plants and rust, exploring materials in flux through processes that involve pressure, printing and dyeing—interested in methods informed by time, touch, transformation, science, nature and experimentation. Her work is attuned to both the artistic possibilities and the embedded social and political histories of materials. The index, witnessing and abstraction become a strategy in Fortin’s work to enlist the imagination in response to the traces of our present reality that the work produces. She explores the affective potential of material encounters to express the inseparability of nature and culture.

Fortin holds a Master of Fine Arts, Studio Art degree from the University of Guelph (Guelph, ON) and completed an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Fine Arts at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University (Halifax, NS). Fortin has participated as a full-time artist-in-residence at Harbourfront Centre (Toronto, ON), Maison des métiers d’art de Québec (Québec City, QC) and Est-Nord-Est (Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, QC). She has received funding and awards from the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, Craft Ontario, Harbourfront Centre, the University of Guelph and the Canadian Federation of University Women. Fortin’s studio is located in Guelph, Ontario, on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Anishinaabe), within the Dish With One Spoon Wampum covenant territory held in partnership with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the historic lands of the Attiwonderonk peoples.