Astrid Butt is a feminist film and performance artist, living and working in Leeds. Her film Bird Diaries is the most recent winner of the FUAM Graduate Art Prize, as well as being a runner up for the Next Thing Moving Image Award. Her work utilises the grotesque and the surreal, exploring uniquely female anxieties, with a particular focus on generational trauma and the terrors of the body. Butt’s work provides an unflinching perspective into the cruelty of womanhood, which she uses to discuss harrowing topics, such as domestic abuse, motherhood and sexual assault. Her stories are often centred around hybridised human-animal characters, all of whom are shaped by their relation to sexuality, shame and violence. Astrid Butt’s work is a product of all the women in her life, to whom the trauma of being a woman has left them feeling out of control over their own bodies.
