While working I’ve have been experiencing a kind of opening, open much like a healing wound. Work is time based and healing requires an awareness to this time.

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, I overthink, that I don’t make a lot of sense, but I don’t always agree and think that I’m just working and thinking through my work from the experience of this neglect.

The title of artist is not something I feel completely connected to because of growing up feeling disconnected the identity and as an adult I started to be more curious about this; it seems that the word art was first defined in the Middle Ages and has morphed and changed so much since then that I’m not only estranged in my experience, but also not sure if I can relate to its origins. While I teach art, and socially might identify as an artist in contemporary ways, I am more invested in the activation of what comes from working, so definitively I feel more comfortable saying that I’m “working.”

Over the years I’ve made work to process neglect, to let go, to think through, and the work is supported with my experiences practicing methods embedded in healing. When I started graduate art school, I questioned what my work was dependent on and I leaned into strategies that could remediate the dependencies that bothered me, starting with my reliance of toxic chemistry and new materials. The materials I started working with spoke to me. For example, it wasn’t just about the aesthetic materiality, but also how it was sourced, who manufactured it, etcetera. When I sit the materials, extraction and labor became deeply connected. Materials reference histories of neglect, of displacement, of wealth extraction. The depth of materials started to nourish the image, and became the image itself. I started to become even more skeptical of the photograph.

I’m currently steeped in the questions and all the questions that continue to form, the questions as much as my practice have become my work.

billy (they/them)

Fall 2025