Bottoms up for winning artist

An artist has been awarded a £20,000 grant from the national lottery to explore cultural attitudes towards women’s bottoms.

The funding, which is earmarked for good causes, has been given to Sue Williams, from south Wales, to examine different attitudes towards “female buttocks”, including “racial fetishism” of the backside in African and European societies.

The Swansea-based artist is creating moulds of women’s behinds – starting with her own – in an attempt to understand the bottom’s significance “in contemporary culture”.



Williams, whose previous sketches of semi-naked women in provocative poses have won a series of awards, rejected the idea that the Arts Council of Wales (ACW) had struck a bum note in awarding the grant.

“The project is taking on the issues around the bottom and how it is viewed in contemporary culture and viewed by the male,” she said. “For example, it is quite clear that the bottom is sacrosanct to the African man and woman.”

Emma Geliot, senior visual arts officer at the ACW, admitted some members of the panel that awarded the grant had been bemused by Williams’s project. “The buttock-casting always produces a tee-hee response and trying to get the decision-making panel to get past that point was difficult, but there is a serious point to make here,” she said. “What we are trying to do is trust the artist to know what they need to do to develop their ideas.”