THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT — that is, this body of work — is created parallel to and in conversation with THE FAILURE EXPERIEMENT, the serial poem by Ricki Cummings, my partner in life and in The Work.

Similar to my previous collections, TFE began with a text I love; a text about love. A text about queerness, identity, memory. A text about our mothers, or how we remember them. A body of text; a text about the body. I layered in my own personal mythology, my own experiences of and with the body: illness and disability, navigating the bureaucracy of social security and Medicaid.

Layering the way that I do results in a collapse of the timeline, crystalizing the most important elements of this body of work: we have always been here, we will always be here. and our fights to be seen, to have love, to have autonomy over our own experiences can be traced like the DNA passed down from our mothers.

My name is Elle Billing; I am an artist, caregiver, and educator.

Making art is how I filter a continuous stream of information, through the particular lens of my queer disabled bodymind.

I create paintings through an iterative process I call Spiritual Archaeology. I layer my personal experiences between literary influences and contemporary media, using mixed media and bold marks. My influences stack up on a common theme, and as I scrape back what I have layered, I am able to excavate a singular truth about my Self and my place in the world.

The materials I am most excited by are vintage books, acrylic paint, all manner of pastels, and compelling songwriter-vocalists.

I am deeply drawn to surrealism, artistic tension, the multiverse, and alternate timelines. In the studio you will find me deconstructing old books, making my own collage paper, and infusing my work with the power of story.

• The Failure Experiment, by Ricki Cummings

• Dance Fever, by Florence + the Machine (album, 2022)

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick

• Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV, 1987-1993)