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, an early reader, her parents were never able to get her to stop doing either and said she was too loud for inside spaces. Elle spent her early years immersed in the creative practices of sewing, music, and theatre. She took art her senior year of high school, and discovered that if she stopped talking just long enough, she could find what she later learned was called a “flow state.”
After completing her college degrees in education, Elle moved to Idaho where she taught deaf and hard-of-hearing students for over a dozen years. She began painting and printmaking in 2018. When the COVID-19 pandemic turned life upside down, Elle left her career as a teacher, moved back home to assist her parents and care for her own health, and pursue art as a full-time endeavor. She lives with fibromyalgia and chronic migraine disease, among other diagnoses; chronic illness and disability form the frame around which the rest of her life is built.
Elle’s has exhibited her work in pop-up galleries with Rebel Art Studio in Twin Falls, Idaho, and her 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.
Artist Statement.
Elle Billing 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 vintage texts – dictionaries culled from thrift store shelves, discarded books from personal libraries. She positions them between layers of high-energy paint, ink, pastel, and a healthy dose of scribbles and handwritten text. Her work offers a clever wink-and-nudge toward the deeper questions of how internal and external factors shape our experiences and influence our identity formation.