Billie Bond
Blinded by the Light 1, porcelain, clinker, and emulsion, 28 cm x 18 cm x 15 cm, 2019
Breathe (bronze), bronze, resin, and gold, 90 cm x 50 cm x 60 cm, 2019
Breathe 1 (detail), black stoneware, resin, and gold, 33 cm x 20 cm x 20 cm, 2018
Breathe 1 and 2, black stoneware, resin, and gold, 33 cm x 20 cm x 20 cm, 2018
Breathe 1 and 2, black stoneware, resin, and gold, 33 cm x 20 cm x 20 cm, 2018
Ecce Mulier After Rosso, bronze, 48 cm x 22 cm x 24 cm, 2019
Momentum, glazed stoneware, resin, gold, and polished steel, 93 cm x 51 cm x 40 cm, 2018
The Look of Resilience, black stoneware, resin, and gold, 40 cm x 33 cm x 22 cm, 2019
Artist Statement
For me, the rendering of realism is a craft, the art begins when I destroy it.
An endless pursuit for equilibrium and compulsive inquiry of matter fuel my creativity; often, I use a material’s history or experience to lead an investigation.
My work is concerned with identity and a personal obsession of revealing the concealed, exposing the discarded and the overlooked, repairing the broken — exploring ideas of duality.
I try to translate an inner being through a disrupted surface, creating new and different visual conversations.
I use processes of destruction and repair to investigate aspects of trauma and healing, rejuvenation and change.
From figurative realism to material-led abstraction, I am discovering ways of paralleling the process of making with altered states and adapted minds in a quest to explore what it is to be human.
About the Artist
Born in Northumberland, North East England, in 1965, Billie Bond grew up in Essex and continues to live there now. An early career in nursing gave her an appreciation of human anatomy, which she considers sensitively in her figurative abstractions. Over more than 20 years of experience as a designer-maker, she has created children’s furniture and interiors, worked in interior decorating, painted murals, and explored her creative ideas in sculpture.
Billie Bond received a master’s in art in sculptural practice in 2016 and a 1st Class Honours Degree in 3D design in 2011 from Colchester School of Art. It was during her studies that she began expressing her creative ideas in the form of figurative sculpture.
The recipient of a research residency at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, Billie Bond sculpted in 2009 her sister, who has Downs syndrome, on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley’s public art project “One & Other” highlighting the importance of art for everyone.
Following a residency at Chelmsford Museum in Essex, Billie Bond’s A Portrait of Chelmsford was accepted into the museum’s collection in 2011. Comprising a series of sculptures of local people, the work represents the cultural identity of Chelmsfordians.
Billie Bond won the Pure Arts Sculpture Prize in 2013; her winning piece, A Link with the Past, was exhibited in a curated space at London’s Saatchi Gallery as part of the Strarta Art Fair. The work now is part of the “Birth Rites” collection that resides at Kings College, London.
More recently, Billie Bond was commissioned by Alan Carr’s “Chatty Man” (a comedy show) to sculpt a character head of Lionel Richie. Another commission, with Janssen EMEA in collaboration with GAMIAN Europe, resulted in the creation of five kintsugi ceramic objects that visually describe the journey of people who live with major depressive disorder (MDD). The work became part of the “Breaking Depression” campaign aimed at broadening understanding of different types of depression, such as MDD, and working together to overcome depression for good.
In 2018, Billie Bond became a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Billie Bond’s solo exhibition, “The Clinker Connection — When Humans Changed Nature” (2019), was inspired by clinker, a waste material left behind from industrial production processes; it is these gnarly nuggets of history that hold stories of progress and change. The exhibition explored ideas of progress through metamorphosis of time and matter, and aimed to question the effect of progress on our delicate environment. With the idea of material, process, and color as metaphors, Billie Bond created work that addressed industrial ancestry, mass production, and consumption.
Presented with an array of ceramic pieces, photography, and a huge figurative installation piece, Billie Bond drew inspiration, from the city’s industrial heritage to today’s consumer culture, giving clinker an extended narrative beyond the garden wall.
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