Elliot Birt (b. 1995) graduated from Leeds Arts University in 2022 with a BA in fine art. Over the course of all three years, he participated in the BAMS Student Medal Project and met with success twice, by winning the Herbie prize for a political medal and receiving a commendation. After leaving university, Birt also received a BAMS Medal Makers grant and became the society’s New Medallist for 2023-24. Since then, he has been developing his practice and exhibiting work all over West Yorkshire, where he lives and works. He is currently producing a body of work that confronts his own and the wider collective memory of the past. Delving into the notion of whether he can trust his own memories given the fact that the brain is an unreliable source for information. The project, ‘Are my memories real or have I made them up?’, is an investigation into this phenomenon and an attempt to reconcile the past and determine its meaning.

About his BAMS medal he writes: ‘The title for the medal, Black Holes and Bolognese, is inspired by a strange effect that matter goes through when crossing the event horizon of a black hole. This effect is called “Spaghettification”. When an object gets extremely close to a black hole, it is stretched and compressed into a long, thin line resembling spaghetti, due to intense tidal forces. These tidal forces are caused by the extreme differences in gravitational pull across the object as it gets closer to the black hole’s centre. I loved the alliteration of the two words and was inspired to make a medal that celebrates this fantastic extreme of reality.