The Human form, in particular the portrait, and a compulsive enquiry of matter fuels my creativity, often using a material’s history or experience to lead a sculptural investigation.
My work is concerned with identity and a personal obsession of revealing the concealed, exposing the discarded and the overlooked, repairing the broken and exploring ideas of duality. I try to translate an inner being through a disrupted surface, creating new and different visual conversations. Processes of destruction and repair investigate aspects of trauma and healing, rejuvenation and change. From figurative realism to material led abstraction I am discovering ways of paralleling the process of making with altered states and adapted minds in a quest to explore what it is to be human.
The formality of ancient Egyptian art, the classicism of Bernini, the madness of Messerschmitt, philosophy and allegory are my inspirations
‘Hope….which whispers from Pandora’s box after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things.
Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing outward and away, until it nudges us to oblivion’ Ian Caldwell, The Rule of Four
Elected Member of Royal Society of Sculptors and the Society of Portrait Sculptors, and winner of the RSS Marchmont House residency.
Billie gained an MA in Sculptural Practice 2016 and a 1st class Honours Degree in 3D Design 2011 at Colchester School of Art. She was also awarded a research residency at the Henry Moore Institute Leeds.
Billie won the Pure Arts Sculpture Prize in 2013, with the winning piece A Link With The Past being exhibited in a curated space at Saatchi Gallery, London as part of the Strarta art fair. The work is now part of the Birth Rites collection residing at Kings College, London.
After a residency at Chelmsford Museum in Essex, her work A Portrait Of Chelmsford was accepted into the Chelmsford museum’s collection. The work, a series of sculptures of local people, represents the cultural identity of Chelmsfordians in 2011.
Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “golden joinery”), also known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”), is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
This body of work explores psychological trauma and healing as a physical narrative through the sculpted portrait. Inspired by the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi, a philosophy of seeing beauty in imperfection, the work questions the tension between destruction and repair, fragility and resilience and thoughts about what it is to be human. The fractured work seeks to consider a critical engagement with the viewer, confronting fundamental questions of the inner self.