Hospitality has always been important to Billie Justice Thomson. Creating welcoming conditions – a warm and convivial space, filled with tunes and people who’ve gathered to share a home-cooked meal– is a ritual as ancient as human society itself.
It’s a disposition that requires a special kind of largess – a generosity of effort, resources, time and spirit. Nerves and meanness are its enemies. Success hinges on the capacity to experience sociable pleasure, nothing more, nothing less.
Billie Justice Thomson makes a virtue of conviviality, finding in it a principal and foundation for a life well lived. And her art practice extends this personal philosophy as a study of appreciation for things collected, shared and remembered. Her artworks of delectable objects – mostly gleaned from the pantry and garden, fishmongers, wine shops and milk bars of old – are scaled up for closer observation, and reverse painted on sheets of clear acrylic so that they float in a space of fascination. The process of reverse painting itself speaks to this contemplative disposition. It begins with the artist’s distinctive black outline, with multiple skins of colour layered in from behind to create images that glossy, sleek and rich in pigment.
In Super Natural, Billie Justice Thomson’s latest series of paintings, the artist has assembled nasturtiums, caperberries, a tomato, a fresh bunch of kale from the weekly vegetable box, and several varieties of oysters. Harking back to historical botanical illustrations used to identify plant species for medical purposes, Billie Justice Thomson’s studies fill the field of the painting with an attentive liveliness. (Such attentiveness should come as no surprise. Alongside a visual arts practice, the artist has worked as an in-demand illustrator for commercial clients, training her eye and developing drafting skills for the past decade.) In the paintings of the oysters that liveliness is amplified by their metallic sheen. That the paintings contain both faithful observation and a freaky vibrancy is a form of witchiness itself and accounts for their sense of potency.
The artist often begins the process of planning an exhibition with a list of items that will eventually form the subject of her paintings. In the final selection, a process of deliberation that sees some objects included, others discarded, possibilities emerge around what is happening between the works and what the grouping suggests. Pivotal in this body of work is the appearance of the Queen of Hearts. Her presence in the exhibition frames this body of work in a range of ways: alluding to play and card games, paganism, and as a powerful symbol of femme energy.
And while Billie Justice Thomson’s paintings are of inanimate objects, perhaps their most beguiling quality is the way they invoke so powerfully the social realm. Circling back to the idea of hospitality – after all, what is all this beauty and bounty if not to be shared – Super Natural is a paean to simple pleasures and living with zest. Not only does it remind us to savour, truly savour, the seasonal rhythms of the garden and the bounty of harvest, but to pay attention to the quotidian. The art of Billie Justice Thomson is an invitation to observe what brings us sustenance, maybe even what lights us up.
Super Natural: Billie Justice Thomson
12.4.2024 — 24.4.2024
North Gallery,
Upstairs
55 Gertrude St, Fitzroy 3065
Melbourne
Australia