A contemplative person walks past a larger painting and a smaller painting in a white gallery spacepast a lar

FAT BABY: University of Leeds MA Fine Art Degree Show

Installation view of ‘Paintings by Em Eve’ at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, 2024. Image: George Storm Fletcher and Fiona Blair.

The MA Fine Art Degree Show at the University of Leeds this year platforms the talent of five graduating artists: Astrid Butt, Em Eve, George Storm Fletcher, Yiwen Wang and Ruolin Wu. Divided into rooms showcasing each artist individually, the five also worked together to curate a single group exhibition in a ground floor project space at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, and collaborated to produce a manifesto titled Fat Baby declaring the exhibition’s existence as ‘feedback to the social structure’. The co-curated display selects works by four of the artists and offers a flavour of what can be found elsewhere, like samples from the menu of each artist’s own show. The project space lends drama and offers a professional presentation with spotlights picking out Butt, Eve and Wu’s wall-mounted works and sculpture, allowing them to be shown alongside projection and light-box works by Fletcher. The varied themes and techniques of their works thus collide in the space, amplifying where the artists’ practices – their support systems – might overlap.

In her solo presentation, Astrid Butt screens four moving image works projected large-scale onto the rear wall of her space. The sequence includes ‘A Horse with No Eyes’ (2024), a 30-minute film that was made during Butt’s Yorkshire Graduate Award residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2023-4. All four short films are populated by human-animal hybrids, creating seamless chronicles of characters that become familiar, almost like the recurring personalities of a television series. The two longer films in particular share a resemblance in tone to Twin Peaks, the artist’s uncanny representations of domestic and outdoor settings revealing the influence of David Lynch.

In ‘A Horse with No Eyes’, Butt amplifies her own sense of unease with the setting of the sculpture park with a surreal interpretation of the cultivated landscape of the Bretton Estate. Referenced in the 1068 Domesday Book as a wasteland, the estate would later become home to successions of aristocratic families who commissioned the creation of features in the landscape, including its lakes and follies. In the narrative of ‘A Horse with no Eyes’, what lies beneath the layers of manufactured pleasure grounds and their current incarnation as a visitor attraction is the spirit of its former wilderness. In this cursed terrain, the animals that roam the otherwise deserted furrows and pastures are women transformed by their own will into creatures. Through trickery they become trapped, unable to return to their human forms. While most of Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s artworks form an incidental backdrop to the film’s plot, Ai Weiwei’s ‘Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads’ (2010) is integral, while Damian Hirst’s ‘The Virgin Mother’ (2005-6) looms in the distance, symbolic of the birth and motherhood themes Butt addresses with a sense of anxiety about parenthood that has resonances with another Lynch work, the cult classic Eraserhead.

People sit watching a projection screen in a dark room, an orange glow comes from the projected film of a singer in a disturbing mask in front of a sunset beach backdrop
Installation view of ‘The Films of Astrid Butt’ at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, 2024. Image: George Storm Fletcher and Fiona Blair.

A second narrative film, ‘Me and the Dog’ (2024), is also looped in the cycle, along with two musical interludes that offer respite from the tension of these longer works. ‘Musical Interlude No. 1 (The Dream)’ (2024) and ‘Musical Interlude No. 2 (Exit Stage Right)’ (2024) feature animal head characters acting the part of instrumentalists in a band while the singer wears a grey horror mask. Against a green screen background of a sunset over the sea, there is less fantasy and more humour as the figures move to the tunes of Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf and Roy Orbison’s Crying, which both reiterate the subject matter explored in the two longer works.

A sense of menace continues in Ruolin Wu’s exhibition space: another dark room, this time lit by monitors showing moving image works within an installation that expands across the floor of the entire space. While Butt’s film’s explore societal and individual concerns through fantasy, continuing the tradition of surrealist film-making, Wu’s work is grounded in the facts of her past and present. The entrance to the room is flanked by two deeply personal works that expose Wu’s real experience of a horrific episode as a teenager in China and the consequences of that lived nightmare. In ‘PLAN OF REVENGE PART 1 TEACHER, STUDENT, POLICE’ (2024), Wu has made a film in which she enacts a revenge on the teacher who raped her as fifteen-year-old girl at boarding school. In the film, Wu is first seen half draped from the window of a parked car, motionless and possibly unconscious. The exterior of the car has sheets of paper taped to its surface.  As Wu emerges, almost naked, clambering out of the window, a passing car stops. The driver shouts to Wu, telling her that she shouldn’t be there. She returns to the first vehicle and hides until he is gone. She then carries out the seemingly ritualistic act of burning an item of clothing along with paper in the road, crouching, almost mesmerised by the flame.

When Wu felt able to contact the police about the crime, she was challenged and remained completely unsupported. The sheets of paper taped to the car in Wu’s film are a transcript of her conversations with the police that retraumatised her. The burning of items she connects with episodes in her past symbolise her revenge, while the reality for Wu is that she will never be able to undo those acts of violence and the subsequent disbelief she encountered.

A nest-like combination of mattress, sheets, detritus slumps in the corner of a dark room. Two tv monitors on the floor glow white, a black plastic material seems to trail from them across the floor.
Installation view of Ruolin Wu’s solo presentation at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, 2024. Image: George Storm Fletcher and Fiona Blair.

The work ‘DEPRESSION’ (2023) addresses the reality of Wu’s trauma response. On a wall-mounted screen a figure is seen bound in black shrink-wrap. Here Wu is shown trapped within a suffocating cocoon, a representation of the traumagenic impact on her mental well-being. The same black substance trails along the floor of the installation space as if escaped from the monitor, like a deadly snake with the capacity to smother. As ‘DEPRESSION’ progresses, Wu finds an opportunity to begin a process of unravelling, freeing herself from the despair that constrains her. In a corner of Wu’s installation space is a nest-like mattress and a monitor that form ‘A LUXURY DREAM’ (2024), which expresses her fantasy of being unaffected by the past violation she had been subjected to.

Em Eve fills the walls of her space with abstract paintings, some of which incorporate collage. Coded in these paintings are part-revealed intentions, thoughts and feelings. It’s tempting to bring well-known references from twentieth-century Abstract and semi-abstract painting to this room, possibly Jean Dubuffet and ‘Art Brut’, or Philip Guston’s mid-career paintings. This brings up the question of the need for a reference, perhaps because art gallery-goers (like myself) have become accustomed to the offer of a way in, a path towards understanding. There’s a different discipline required for looking at Eve’s work: to leave at the door the baggage of art history, recording events and experience from a limited perspective that doesn’t always apply. Eve’s paintings demand that the viewer simply enjoy their surfaces without looking for meaning, but taking it if and where it is found.

Yiwen Wang presents her degree show across two spaces, dividing her exhibition by media. One space presents five moving image works on monitors alongside documentation of a performance piece. The second space shows a series of 24 works on card in oil pastel and other media, in a room that features a bed.

A person asleep in a small bed in the middle of a bright room. Colourful drawings are hung on the back wall.
Installation view of Yiwen Wang’s solo presentation at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, 2024. Image: George Storm Fletcher and Fiona Blair.

Wang occupies this second space intermittently throughout the MA show. The wall-hung works represent pages from a diary that Wang expands during her residence, the bed functioning as her temporary studio. The titles of Wang’s works are poignant and poetic, imparting a sense of timelessness to the drawings that represent a single day. In ‘Thousands of Your Perspectives’ (2024), the bark of trees in a forest bear a multitude of eyes, set against an apocalyptic day-glo pink sky. Many of Wang’s other works convey sadness or loneliness, such as ‘A House Can Cry’ (2024).

George Storm Fletcher has set themselves the ambitious task of filling the large space at the far end of the School of Fine Art building with their show Vandalise. With roof-lights, odd architectural shapes and exposed ducting, this is far from a pristine white cube space. In fact, the walls have deliberately been painted by Fletcher in the colour magnolia – a staple in almost every decorator’s palette.

Other items from a domestic setting include the carpet that was laid in Fletcher’s family home the week they were born, remaining there for 26 years until it was taken up earlier this year. Hanging from the ceiling are two sets of pre-fabricated double-glazed windows in UPVC frames, positioned at right-angles as if framing the apertures of an imagined house. Together with the carpet they form the installation ‘B. 1997’ (2024). Where windows can be considered portals from the interior to the outside, here they form barriers in space. The show also includes a pair of electrical consumer units, including one that Fletcher’s father originally wired up in the same bungalow the carpet is from. ‘FUSE’ (2023-4) together with ‘GREG’S HEAD’ (2024) form a display in one corner of Fletcher’s space, where several other consumer units collected by the artist over time have been transformed into light boxes with the addition of a lamp and words or images printed and painted onto acetate. These represent Fletcher’s nightmares. They include rats and the graphic used in the warning sign that alerts drivers to the risk of their car falling into water. This is a symbol etched into Fletcher’s mind from many journeys crossing road bridges over the Ramsey Forty Foot Drain on the outskirts of Ely.

A large sheet hangs from the ceiling with a painted phrase: 'EVERYON IS THEY EXCEPT YOU'. On the back and side walls, painted magnolia, are framed black and white prints.
Installation view of ‘Vandalise’ by George Storm Fletcher at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, 2024. Image: George Storm Fletcher and Fiona Blair.

Ely, Fletcher’s hometown, is one of the smallest cities in England, located between Cambridge and the Fenlands. Its enormous cathedral is built on the site of a highly successful Benedictine Monastery. Ely is also the location of the country’s fourth most ‘bashed’ bridge, a subject that Fletcher has made into a series of photogravure etchings on paper. Fletcher appropriates photos through the community website ‘Spotted in Ely’, which documents each occasion the low Stuntney bridge by Ely station is struck by a van. Fletcher’s choice of unbleached Fabriano printer’s paper is a close match for the magnolia walls these framed works are mounted onto.

Fletcher takes inspiration from the homely, the local and the everyday, finding integrity in simple materials such as dust-sheets, which refer to their and their father’s trade as decorators. Here, one is utilised as the support for Fletcher’s large-scale text work ‘THEY/YOU’ (2024), the words of which (‘EVERYONE IS THEY EXCEPT YOU’) can be interpreted as stating the case for the pronoun ‘they’ as a common denominator. A ghost rug has been created on the floor of Fletcher’s space from the traces of painting ‘THEY/YOU’ in that spot during the installation period. There is a tension between the titling of Fletcher’s show, which signifies wilful destruction and violence, and its contents, which seem brought together with great care. Even the disruption caused by the van drivers that strike the low bridge is out of error rather than ill-intent.

Having given birth to Fat Baby, Butt, Eve, Fletcher, Wang and Wu are themselves released into the wider art world in its myriad forms. Their tongue-in-cheek manifesto claiming that the ‘baby’s genealogy is untraceable, but it is collectively parented’ is contradicted by the uniqueness and deeply personal nature of the individual artist shows. They describe the ‘exertion of birth’, acknowledging the strain of achieving the shared goal of realising their MA studies with their final shows and, no doubt, the emotional and physical input required, but with bravado state that they ‘will emerge nourished and well fed’. Set free from the institution that has nurtured their abilities, these five artists now take their individual tracks.

Charu Vallabhbhai is a museums and arts sector professional, independent curator and writer based in West Yorkshire.

Fat Baby, the MA Fine Art Degree Show at the University of Leeds, ran from 3 – 8 September 2024.

This review is supported by the University of Leeds.

Published 22.10.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews

2,128 words