Ruta Butkute

Born 1984, Kaunas living/working Amsterdam r.m.butkute@gmail.com www.rutabutkute.com Ruta Butkute sculpture and video installation artist. She graduated from Vilnius art academy (VDA) in 2007, where she studied traditional ceramic techniques. Butkute continued her studies in Gerrit Rietveld academie (2007-2010), during and after her studies she have been developing contemporary sculptural installation methods. Butkute introduced video to approach her sculptural installations in an new way, treating video in sculptural way; approaching sculptural qualities such as weight, mass, surface, tension. Through a displacement of function I question the interpretation of the unique, rediscovering the object by freeing it from its original function and context or use. It then returns to a state of being undefined and opening to a sense of physical, tactile rediscovery. Much like an archeological find, I like my sculptural installations to invite the spectator to examine and question these sculptural objects and their origins in relation to nature and culture. I like to see sculpture not as a form of translation, but rather as transformation. While observing sites through various techniques such as sculpture, photography or video, my approach to these media is always sculptural; dealing with issues as weight, volume, surface etc. By interpreting a site through sculpture I intend to break up the cohesion of the whole.This is a way to both free the parts from its whole and to free the whole from its parts. So working from parts or fragments i find liberating, because a fragment is always suggesting a greater whole and offering an interpretation of the whole.

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