face against the dark wood Painting

Ultimately, Billowes’s multi-disciplined practice opens up a debate between female restraints within mythical narrative, the qualities of media through tactile mark-making, and creates questions about works viewed post-internet age and the tricky landscape that they now inhabit. The work chooses its own form, and she is there to help it through that process. Her practice is circular: it feeds into itself. It enjoys this strong, playful, material-based aesthetic, creating dis[order] and disruption to try and make sense of a drawing practice in such a digital age. An important distinction is that the works are the feeling - they’re not describing it. The undeniable, seductive nature of myth is that it’s a meta-language. A language to describe another language. The work seeks to illuminate the strength, resilience, and agency of these female characters, revealing the richness of their energy and narrative in mark-making. Barthes describes myth as a thin film to view work through and in the same way her poetic texts feed the work the narratives about the unfair treatment of women - the idea of being stuck in a vessel that substantially limits what’s achievable. We acknowledge this in recent work: a visual language whereby process and meaning are intrinsically linked. Her process is gestural and instinctive; paintings are constructed through repeated negotiations between the drawn image and its erasure. The works go through multiple iterations, continually informed and shaped by her writings. The act of painting becomes a celebration of their resilience and an exploration of their emotions beyond the confines of traditional mythology. Her digital drawings are the same. Everything is liable to be scrubbed away in a visceral, felt process. Painting is about possibility. As she works, things come and go again, but always leaving traces.