Artist Statement + Bio
Artist Bio.
Elle Billing (she/they) is a queer, disabled artist residing on Očhéthi Šakówiŋ land in rural North Dakota. An early talker and an early reader, her parents were never able to get her to stop doing either and often said she was too loud for inside spaces.
Elle spent their early years immersed in the creative practices of sewing, music, and theatre. They took art their senior year of high school, and discovered that if they stopped talking just long enough, they could find a “flow state.”
After completing college degrees in education, Elle moved to Idaho where she quickly fell into the pattern of perfectionism that had plagued her throughout school. This time, it was the adult version known as workaholism, which left her no bandwidth for the creative pursuits that had grounded her when she was younger.
Elle first began painting and printmaking in 2018, as a way to process their experience with migraine disease and an abusive relationship. The COVID-19 pandemic turned life upside down; burnout, chronic illness, and disability forced Elle to reorganize her life around care, rest, and and artistic expression as a form of self- and community care.
Elle left her career as a classroom teacher, moved back home to assist her parents and care for her own health, and pursue art as a full-time endeavor. Chronic illness and disability form the frame around which the rest of her life is built.
With Elle & Wink, Elle is co-creating a world where care and connection are prioritized, and folks can create art for art’s sake, untethered from productivity culture and capitalist pressure.
Elle’s has exhibited their work in pop-up galleries with Rebel Art Studio in Twin Falls, Idaho; in the annual Paint Fearless Exhibitions; and their paintings are held in private collections from Buhl, Idaho, to Seoul, Korea.
Studio Dog Bio.
Winkie is a deaf Australian Cattle Dog. Born on a ranch in Cody, Wyoming, she prefers herding crows to rounding up cows. She is a most excellent studio dog and her current record for consecutive popcorn catches is 22.
Winkie’s alter ego is Saint Winkus Aloysius of Buttzville, the Patron of Hoorf! Podcast. Saint Winkus — Blessed is She Among Doggos — is also the patron of spins, carbs, and most importantly, Long Covid and other chronic illnesses.
Elle Billing (she/they) is a mixed-media artist who creates through the lens of her lived experiences as a disabled queer individual. Her first career as a reading and language teacher influences her studio work through the use of found texts – dictionaries culled from thrift store shelves, discarded books from personal libraries. Elle layers their personal experiences between literary influences and contemporary media, using high-energy marks of paint, ink, pastel, and a healthy dose of scribbles and handwritten text. As her influences stack up on a common theme, she begins to peel back what has accrued, excavating a singular idea about the Self and one’s place in the world. Through multiple iterations of this practice, she has distilled her approach into a process she dubs Spiritual Archaeology.
Elle’s current work addresses memory, identity, and the received narratives of the so-called Western literary canon.
Artist Statement.