Rotherham Advertiser-Chase Magazine

‘I love experimenting with colour’
Posted by apc1606


Samira Butt

Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance (ROAR) chief executive SHARON GILL talks to artist Samira Butt
THERE has been a great deal of attention in recent years around everyday creativity, all those actions we may do naturally that we do not think of as being expressive. The Arts Council’s new 10 year strategy, Let’s Create, highlights this even further by embedding the idea into their three outcomes: Creative People, Cultural Communities and A Creative and Cultural Country.
Samira Butt is potentially the embodiment of that ethos, as a self-taught artist with no formal training beyond O-Level but with ambitions for a creative career.
I wanted to talk to Samira because she had just launched a new website – https://www.arimasarts.com/ – which is something many trained and mid-career artists do not do for themselves, partially because you need to generate an artist statement which is a challenging thing to do, to write about yourself.
We begin with the decision to move their family to Rotherham in 2004, from nearby Tinsley. Samira and her husband have three sons who at one time were in different schools, and due to catchment areas and a reorganisation of the school system, the school run became a trial, so moving to Rotherham helped to minimise the travelling time.
This also meant one of their sons could take the performing arts opportunities offered through Open Minds Theatre Company, which at that time was a thriving organisation. As supportive parents, this led to getting involved in the delivery of the Diversity Festival. In fact when I started at ROAR and began the journey with the Diversity Festival, both Samira’s husband and son were on the management committee...

To read the full article, please click on the link below.

‘I love experimenting with colour’


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