SOFTctrl is a new solo exhibition by emerging artist Billie Adele, developed through the Backwater Artists Group Ciarán Langford Memorial Bursary, awarded to Adele in 2025.

SOFTctrl is a series of oil paintings exploring the tension between constructed feminine experience and something more unstable and uncontrollable beneath it. Through grotesque, hyperfeminine figures adorned with beauty masks, scold’s bridles, bunny ears and other coded symbols the work examines femininity as a system of soft control, where beauty, performance and expectation operate as mechanisms of surveillance and self-policing.

Drawing on the visual languages of horror, sci-fi and occult symbolism, Adele creates visceral, mutating forms that leak, multiply and destabilise fixed ideas of selfhood, exposing the exhausting labour of performance and social acceptability. Rich with dark humour and material excess, the paintings use oil paint itself as an unstable, alchemical force – shifting, spilling and refusing resolution.

About the Artist
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. Billie graduated with First Class Honours from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design in 2025. She was the recipient of the Backwater Artists Group Ciarán Langford Memorial Bursary, the Sample Network Award and the Swerve Magazine Residency Prize. Her work was included in the RHA 195th Annual Exhibition.

About the Ciarán Langford Memorial Bursary
The Backwater Artists Group, Ciarán Langford Memorial Bursary is awarded annually to a graduating artist from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, who demonstrates talent and ambition in their practice. The award includes a free studio space for 6 months at Backwater Artists Group, a solo exhibition with associated supports, including an artist’s fee and mentorship by a relevant art professional. Throughout 2025/2026 Billie has been mentored by Lindsey Mendick