Despite constantly demonstrating an exceptional talent of creation, Billie M. Vigne will tell the story of an object before mentioning her artwork. As a voracious gatherer of material, the artist and metalsmith tells an ongoing story of caring and fixing, placing the understanding of ancestral manual labour and technique at the core of all that she puts out into the world. Navigating disability and chronic illness, she has forged her own expeditions in order to understand the world with her own artillery, at her own pace. Mirroring her survival tactics, it is through mending and reusing that Billie beautifies and cushions her world, and with singular humour embellishes ours too. A larger-than-life needle becomes the embodiment of the stability holding all pieces and times in her life together. The sturdiness of the thread emanating from the needle is in fact her roped and threaded bedsheets, the bed being the place designed to preserve and solidify her energy. Most of her work is sewn together, evocative of the firepower within her character muscling through strenuous experiences. Growing up bedbound and isolated, Billie has developed resistance in the form of alter-egos, fabric, time and feeling. With visceral language of disgust, she described ‘bed clothes’ of the 2000s as a grotesque representation of her suffering: those forced to wear them deserve beautiful pieces made with care. Adamant that fabric should respond to the very tender nature of sharing the sacred space of the bed, 'Suit of Bill Bones' is her very intimate response to spending extended time in bed again during the pandemic. Made of a throw purchased the first time she used a wheelchair, later placed on her bed for years, then carried from home to home, she uses memories as a hide to face a present she struggles to understand. Billie is the strongest person I know, and we mere mortals would be so lucky to be pricked by her needle. 

Billie M Vigne is an artist and metalsmith based in Margate, Kent. Billie’s work uses world-building and non-linear storytelling to articulate the notion of dwelling as an all-encompassing methodology, nurturing personal mythologies that draw parallels between the bed and the seashore as ‘the First and Last place’. Through installation, sound, performance, animation and an array of historical, artisanal and folk/vernacular craft techniques Billie’s works communicate the temperamental intricacies of chronic illness, orientating hand-making as a fundamental conduit for memorialising embodied experience in external objects.