Billie Adele
Artist Bio
Billie Adele is a visual artist whose practice explores the wildness and contradictions of identity and embodiment through large-scale figurative paintings and sculptural installations. Her work draws on grotesque theory, the monstrous feminine, and the alchemy of paint as a collaborator, creating hybrid bodies that challenge traditional beauty standards. Influenced by archaic beauty apparatus (often resembling instruments of restraint) serving as almost extensions of the body- hybrid beings comprised of various painting techniques to reflect multiplicity of identity-echoing a sense of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, Billie’s figures navigate paradoxes of organic versus mechanical, attraction and repulsion, vulnerability and power, beauty and horror. Her work also incorporates themes from the occult, science fiction literature and cinema, and campy horror aesthetics. Ultimately, the bodies in her paintings transgress their limitations, oozing and leaking into their environments, revealing how true nature prevails beyond all boundaries.
For Billie, painting is a deeply embodied and spiritual process, informed by her own physicality and her engagement with practices such as yoga and dance, where the body is pushed to its physical limits. Similarly, her paintings are pushed against the boundaries of their canvases, embodying this tension and physicality. This intimate connection to the body animates her work, allowing her to create forms that resist containment and celebrate multiplicity and transformation.
Her work embraces performance, ritual, and theatricality to subvert oppressive ideals, reclaiming the body as a site of power and defiance. Billie’s practice is marked by a nuanced interplay of humor, horror, and grotesque imagery that invites viewers into eerie, timeless spaces where femininity is both spectacle and rebellion.
Billie graduated with First Class Honours from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design in 2025. She has been fortunate to receive support and recognition through awards such as the Backwater Ciarán Langford Memorial Award, the Sample Network Award and the Swerve Magazine Residency Prize. Her work has been included in exhibitions like the RHA 195th Annual Exhibition and the MTU Graduate Show, and she looks forward to participating in the upcoming group exhibition Ar Scáth A Chéile in early 2026.
Artist Statement
My work is both a celebration of femininity and an act of defiance against patriarchal constraints. Drawing from grotesque theory and the monstrous feminine, I use exaggerated, amorphous female forms to challenge and subvert beauty standards, and reclaim the body as a site of power and transformation.
Influenced by the occult, science fiction literature and cinema, campy horror aesthetics, and strange beauty contraptions from both past and present, I construct eerie, timeless, suspended realities that expose and subvert oppressive ideals. The theatrical aspect of my work aims to satirise notions of performative femininity, and the absurdity of beauty as ritual, transforming symbols of objectification into rebellion.
Through macabre humor, monstrous forms, and fragmentation, I create space for the unruly and untamed body and spirit. The alchemy of paint itself becomes a messy protest, creating leaking, sutured forms that resist containment and reflect multiplicity of identity. In this chaotic interplay I create bodies that emerge not as passive objects of beauty, but as autonomous and ever-transforming forces of resistance.
Membership: Ciarán Langford Memorial Bursary 
