MA Fine Art students from the University of Leeds are pleased to announce the birth of their Degree Show, FAT BABY.
Open to the public until 8 September, FAT BABY showcases all forms of plastic arts, including film and video art; painting, performance and sculpture; printmaking, drawing and installation.
Ranging through all mediums of contemporary practice, this free exhibition celebrates the work of five artists from the UK and China – Astrid Butt, Em Eve, George Storm Fletcher, Yiwen Wang and Ruolin Wu.
Independently organised and curated by the graduating students, FAT BABY features a group show in the downstairs Project Space, with individual solo shows across the studios on the first and second floors of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.
Featured work includes Astrid Butt’s new film A Horse with No Eyes – made on residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park – and George Storm Fletcher’s The Second Rule of Assertiveness, which was commissioned by Leeds Art Gallery as part of the Arts Council touring exhibition, Found Cities, Lost Objects (curated by Lubaina Himid).
George Storm Fletcher is a performance artist and Menace. Originally from Ely, in the fens of East Anglia, they have lived and worked in Leeds for six years, graduating with a BA Fine Art from the University of Leeds in 2022.
In recent years, George’s work has manifested as a series of text-based architectural interventions, with an immediate, DIY aesthetic. Fletcher uses found objects, physical and immaterial, appropriating them for new compositions. Their distinctive lettering offers a new ‘voice’ for objects, reclaiming and reappropriating commonplace imagery to make a statement on the ‘now.’
Grounded in a sense of Britain’s shifting identity and blurred nostalgia, their work plays with informal expressions and slang, memory and storytelling, through a playful and empathic lens.
George’s work has been exhibited widely at venues such as Leeds Art Gallery, Sunny Bank Mills and the RA Summer Exhibition in London in 2022. For their MA Fine Art Degree Show presentation, George has created a series of works surrounding the scene of ‘accidents’.
George said:
“As a group of students, we exhibited our work together through a two-part interim show earlier this year to give a taste of how our practices have developed over the MA course. What’s in Your Fridge? in the Project Space at the University of Leeds and What’s in your Freezer? at Patrick Studios in Mabgate gave us the opportunity to take stock and present a range of painting, text-based work, audio-visual experimentation and live art fun.
“This September, we have come together for one last time to exhibit collectively and individually.
“The work that I am showing in FAT BABY culminates the past two years of my study in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies but also the last six years, as I also completed my undergraduate BA here.
“I have made all new works, using the vast space of the school’s Green Studio to make large scale pieces, both text-based work and new sculptural ideas.
“I am also premiering a new series called Britain’s 4th Most Bashed Bridge, which is a set of photogravure etchings that I have been working on with artist Ellen Burroughs – I think these are going to really resonate with the car crash atmosphere of the world right now.
“Of course, I have made a new series of lightboxes but these are built from materials new to me and I am excited to see how they ‘read’ in a degree show context.
“I have tried to be brave in the works that I am showing, not relying on old ideas but using the time and space I have allowed to be more daring in my making.”
Astrid Butt is a feminist film and performance artist, living and working in Leeds. Astrid graduated with a BA Fine Art from the University of Leeds in 2022, and was the winner of the FUAM Graduate Art Prize in the same year for her horror film Bird Diaries (2022).
Butt’s films utilise the grotesque and the surreal, burrowing into uniquely female anxieties, with a particular focus on generational trauma and the terrors of the body. The recipient of the Yorkshire Graduate Award 2023, her work provides ‘an unflinching perspective into the cruelty of womanhood, cracking open the ribs of femininity and unspooling a voice that is equally filled with intense power and intense grief’.
Astrid said:
“My space within FAT BABY is dark and cavernous, but equally warm and intriguing. A red carpet will lead you into Purple Studio, a blacked-out room illuminated solely by the film screening on the far right wall. The images you will see in this room, of women transformed into animals, of bodies beaten and warped into submission, will transport you into a dreamlike landscape of the surreal and the grotesque.
“After discovering my love for creating short films during my BA Fine Art degree here at the University of Leeds, I was determined to create something that could supersede my previous work – Bird Diaries – in terms of quality and ambition.
“I have spent the past two years of my Masters degree writing various scripts, experimenting with editing software and branching into performance art.
“After earning the Yorkshire Graduate Award and spending two weeks at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, I have created my longest and most ambitious work to date. A Horse with No Eyes is a 30-minute short film, exploring a nightmarish cursed land that transform its female inhabitants into animals against their will.
“Alongside this film, I will be showing other video work – including a piece relating to my previous performance work Feeding Time, and the debut of a monstrous all-star band performing two unsettling classic songs for your pleasure.”
A series of audiovisual installations and an untitled performance piece by Yiwen Wang are showcased in the Photography and Orange Studios.
Yiwen said:
“I am a casual and self-centered artist, and almost all of my works are about myself. The content involved is very sensitive and personal. I prefer to create through the medium of painting, action, and photography. I will not stop creating.
“My favorite part is actually the title of each of my works, such as: People at Work are So Scary; until the Building Collapses, until the June Dies; After Dying Thousands of Times, Do We Still Want to, Want to Live Passionately? and Embrace the Death, then, You embrace the Love. My works require the audience to watch it at a very slow pace.
“My works are always contradictory, constantly conflicting and questioning internally. They are difficult for people to capture, but I do not explain them too much. I understand that my works are very personal, and I do not expect others’ understanding and recognition. I like to see different people associate their different experiences with them and come up with their own opinions. I always want to keep the author as anonymous as possible in my art works.
“The experience of studying with lovely classmates and teachers at the University of Leeds is very incredible. I won’t forget it.”
Ruolin Wu focuses on the exploration of performance art and has recently been experimenting with installation art forms of expression.
Works on show in Yellow studio include: Depression; Revenge Plan I: Teacher, Student, Police; Revenge Plan II: I often feel stomachache; and Revenge Plan III: The Freedom of Children.
A series of four digital photographs by Ruolin – Traces of My Existence (2023) – are displayed in the group show in Project Space.
Ruolin said:
“The long-term project Revenge Project will have an output of ten projects and is currently on its third. This project is one of my most important projects at the moment. It is an art series derived from ten real tragic events in my childhood, and is an artistic revenge carried out by me now.”
The show also includes work by Em Eve, a Leeds-based painter working in mixed media.
A range of Em’s paintings are exhibited in the expansive space of Grey Studio, in addition to two paintings in Project Space – Obligation (2024) and Delph Mount (2024).
Dr Cesar Cornejo, Associate Professor Fine Art and MA Fine Art programme lead in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies said:
“We are excited to welcome this FAT BABY to this world.
“The students have been working hard on their projects, dealing with all sort of challenges on the way which they have masterly conquered for a smooth delivery.”
An evening private view on Thursday 5 September gave guests the opportunity to meet the five artists taking part and find out more about the pieces on show in the exhibition.
More of George Storm Fletcher’s work can be seen at an accompanying solo show at Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds (open daily until 12 September). In HEAVEN, Fletcher documents an oral history of Leeds across two generations through a film and exhibition. It centres on a main road artery that runs through the student centre of Leeds – the infamous Kirkstall Road – and was created in collaboration with 2019 fine art alumni Ronnie Danaher and George’s Mum, Amanda.
The last word on FAT BABY goes to the artists and the thinking behind their degree show:
“We are a group of five artists, none of us are men. We have been nourished by the past year of study, and given birth to a FAT BABY.
“This exhibition relishes its own fleshiness, its own weight and matter. FAT BABY is feedback to the social structure. Born under a series of systems, fat piles up on our bodies, fat symbolizes culture, fat is ideas taught by teachers. These things should not be trimmed away. FAT BABY takes joy in its own conception, it is compacted and refined, unctuous and alive. This baby’s genealogy is untraceable, but it is collectively parented.”
“Like lipids, the subject and materiality of our show is all encompassing, it can be found all over our world, in our drains, our bodies and hospitals; in our fridges and cupboards. Despite the exertion of birth, we will emerge, nourished and well fed.”
More information
FAT BABY runs from 3 to 8 September in the studios and shared spaces of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies on University Road at the University of Leeds. Open daily from 10am to 4pm, the exhibition is free and all are welcome.
Find out more about the MA Fine Art Degree Show and the artists.
Images
1. George Storm Fletcher’s solo show – Vandalise – in Green Studio.
2. Mixed media paintings by Em Eve in Grey Studio.
3. Installation view of the group show in Project Space, showing work by Astrid Butt, Em Eve and George Storm Fletcher.
4. Second working sketch for The 2nd Rule of Assertiveness by George Storm Fletcher, emulsion on paper, October 2023. The completed lightbox artwork is on display in Project Space as part of the FAT BABY exhibition at the University of Leeds. Photo courtesy George Storm Fletcher.
5. George Storm Fletcher with their new text work Everyone is They Except You in Green Studio, FAT BABY MA Fine Art Degree Show, September 2024.
6. Still from DOWN by George Storm Fletcher, emulsion, water and the artist with Bruce Springsteen, 2024. Photo courtesy George Storm Fletcher.
7. George Storm Fletcher’s solo show in Green Studio, including Everyone is They Except You and Britain’s 4th Most Bashed Bridge
8. George Storm Fletcher with new lightbox installation created for FAT BABY.
9. Astrid Butt with her film Musical Interlude No.1 in Purple Studio.
10. Sculptural prop and story board for Astrid Butt’s film A Horse with No Eyes, exhibition in Project Space.
11. Astrid Butt, Bird Diaries, 2022 (screenshot). Photo © Astrid Butt. Image courtesy the artist.
12. Screenshot from Astrid Butt’s film A Horse with No Eyes, 2024. Photo © Astrid Butt. Courtesy YSP.
13. Guests at the private view of FAT BABY watch Astrid Butt’s films in Purple Studio.
14. Yiwen Wang’s untitled performance piece in Orange Studio. Image © Yiwen Wang. Photo by Ruolin Wu.
15. Yiwen Wang in Orange Studio with a series of works in oil pastel and pencil.
16. Yiwen Wang, What is Birthday? (2003). Oil pastel and pencil, 210mm x 297mm. Image courtesy the artist.
17. View of video installation by Yiwen Wang – Introspection – in the Photography Studio.
18. Ruolin Ru, Depression.
19. Ruolin Ru in Project Space with digital photos from Traces of My Existence series.
20. One of four digital photographs from Traces of My Existence by Ruolin Wu.
21. Ruolin Wu, Revenge Plan I: Teacher, Student, Police. Video, 8’44. Image courtesy the artist.
22. Em Eve with mixed media painting in Grey Studio.
23. Gallery view of mixed media paintings by Em Eve in Grey Studio.
24. The artists featured in FAT BABY exhibition – Astrid Butt, Em Eve, George Storm Fletcher, Yiwen Wang, Ruolin Wu – with work by Wang at the exhibition private view.
25. Still from HEAVEN by George Storm Fletcher. Image courtesy of George Storm Fletcher & Ronnie Danaher.
26. FAT BABY artwork courtesy of Em Eve & Astrid Butt. Design by George Storm Fletcher.
27. The graduating MA Fine Art students of FAT BABY in Green Studio. Works by George Storm Fletcher.
28. Outside the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.
Photos by Fiona Blair and © the artists unless otherwise stated.