INCREDIBLY TALENTED LEEDS BASED ARTIST ASTRID BUTT IS THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2023 YORKSHIRE GRADUATE AWARD
Leeds student claims renowned Yorkshire Graduate Award for 2023
“We’re delighted to announce up & coming artist Astrid Butt as the recipient of the 2023 Yorkshire Graduate Award.
Leeds-based Astrid intrigued the Yorkshire Sculpture Park judges with her use of animal-human hybrid characters to explore womanhood and domestication.
She is currently studying for her Master’s degree in Fine Art at University of Leeds University and her work utilises the grotesque and surreal to express female anxieties, with a particular focus on generational trauma and the terrors of the body.
Astrid’s work takes on a feminist perspective, which she uses to discuss sensitive topics, such as motherhood, domestic abuse and sexual assault.
“Throughout the last academic year, I have been trying to escape the confines of my own fear and shame surrounding womanhood, through my art.”
Bird Diaries is the title of Butt’s most recent work: a 10 minute, 1:1 short film to be displayed in a gallery space. The central figure of the film is an original character: a cartoonish bird-woman hybrid, who dons a skin-coloured leotard and laments over her relationships with men, women and her own body. The film is a surreal, Lynchian horror, complete with disturbing archive footage, a troublingly raw script, and eerie voice-over narration.
“My art is a product of all the women in my life, to whom the trauma of being a woman has left them feeling out of control over their own bodies.”