The bed of Bill Bones is a ship in the night,
A rattly tram; a casket; a pram;
A shell; a cocoon; the main space in the room;
A voyaging, seafaring, freight-crate of doom.
- The Book of Bill Bones
The Bed of Bill Bones is an installation of sculpture, textiles, painting, sound, collaborative performance and metalworks by Billie M Vigne that deals with the conflict between tropes of artisanal and hobbyist craftsmanship. Shipwrecked at The Horse Hospital, the artist’s bed finds itself at the centre of a strange world, enshrined amongst works that try to recall visions of a mystical and slippery alter ego. Scrawlings in charcoal and household emulsion on bedsheets and chip shop paper alongside embossed beer cans and precious, fused silver votive offerings depict fragments of origin stories that investigate the great conundrum… who or what is Bill Bones?
The sense of being cast adrift, alone in the bed, is an inescapable outcome of living with the chronic illness ‘ME’ for 25 years. Throughout Billie’s work, the bed flies, floats, sails and gallops through the landscapes it has inhabited, accruing the materials of those places as tools for diarising the journey along the way. It also brings with it qualities that are tempered by illness; unfinishedness, slowness, urgency and frustration. By taking this very private, longstanding relationship with the bed into the public realm and inviting collaborators in, the life of the bed-bound individual is turned inside-out and upside-down, unfolding a hermitage into a mythic pilgrimage through layered times and spaces. Spaces through which, hopefully, a new and expansive form of bed culture can thrive.
The Bed of Bill Bones marks the one year anniversary since 2023’s Flat 4, Old Arthur’s Bequest: an exhibition in an empty flat on Arthur Road in Margate on the last day of Billie’s 7.5 year tenancy. Bill Bones was born there and all the works made there regurgitate the materiality of the flat: builder’s caulk, polyfiller and woodchip wallpaper, combined with the grotto-like unbleached chalkiness of the seashore at the end of Arthur Road.
Following on from this show — and a move to a new house where the bedroom opens up onto a garden — new works are beginning to blossom. Alongside the works of Old Arthur, the new shoots sprout green and huge roots grow down, through the woods of Riddley Walker, past the rocks and bones of ancient reliquaries and sites of pilgrimage, and onwards, until the tendrils reach the cool, dark brown cobbles of The Horse Hospital.
Throughout the exhibition there will be various discussions from the bed on illness, a soundpiece and collaborative performance from ‘broken folk’ troubadours Lunatraktors, a Riddley Walker discussion group led by English Heretics Jemma Cullen and Andy Sharp and a closing performance from sound artists Rosie Carr and Melinda Bronstein.
Care has been taken to address a variety of access needs during the exhibition but if you have specific requirements in order to visit, please contact The Horse Hospital to see if we can accomodate them.
