The very trade of sculpture is the manipulation of bodily substance; the spiritual, the metaphysical - call it what you like - cannot manifest itself independently

Butler worked as a blacksmith during the war and developed this skill in his welded and shaped metal sculpture. He had a fascination with the ancient Willendorf Venus sculpture and his female figures are often highly sexualised. Girl shows this obsession. Elongated and perched on a grid, she pulls a clinging garment over her head, her face stretched upwards in a kind of funnel. In his teaching at the Royal College of Art, Butler was the first to distinguish in art between the idealised female nude and the natural naked woman.