Work is arguably all time based, and while working I’ve have been experiencing a kind of opening, open much like a healing wound in the air and sunlight.

As a child, I experienced neglect both in my family as well as systemically, via poverty and the education system. As an adult, I was recently diagnosed ASD 1 and ADHD inattentive in 2022. These are typically considered comorbidities, but I think the word divergence works better for how I understand the way my brain works. When discussing my work, it's a fairly regular experience to hear that I work too much and overthink, but I don’t always agree and tend to think that I’m actually working and thinking. My working and thinking might be different than someone who isn’t AuDHD, and in that respect, I’m doing my best to work and think in my own way.

Over the years I’ve made a lot of family work, to process, to let go, to think through, and the work is supported with my experiences with listening, learning, and practicing being present. When I started graduate art school, I questioned what my work was dependent on and I leaned into strategies that could remediate the things in my that bothered me, my reliance of toxic chemistry and materials, the continual looping back to family work, and the strategies I’ve practiced have become a kind of ritual that has indeed lead to some clarity for me.

The above print is from one of the first projects I did to remediate, the composting the father series. The pain embedded in family work and macro systems don’t just dissolve by working, but all of these layers have become less loud, and healing, one the ways I can imagine this is that dependencies exist in a gradient with the agency. The more I work the less loud the dependencies are. One of the strategies I’ve been experimenting with is actively using my body as a mediator between the camera and the resulting image. This can be seen in composing the father #3.

Materials have also become more present as I’ve started to realize that images are more than prints on ink soaked or silver geletain covered paper or films, they are the paper and film, and their qualities can be found through listening a kind of listening to the material(s). For example, composting the father has materials from a shipping container from the Donald Young gallery, the wood and the foam were once a support for someone’s art, and now the materials are embodied in the image both conceptually and visually.

The title of artist is not something I feel completely connected to, as for me, art was something defined in the Middle Ages and have morphed and changed so much since then that I’m not sure that is what I am doing. Currently I am in a practice associated with art making, and being an artist, in contemporary ways, but I am more interested in the activation of the process through working. When people ask what I do, or what I am doing, I’ve been comfortable saying that “I am working.”

billy (they/them)