Billy Bagilhole’s practice is rooted in the grand painting tradition but with thoroughly modern and often idiosyncratic visual motifs.  There is often a filmic quality to his paintings – some borrow the language of a dramatic close up or movie poster, others more like a wistful landscape in widescreen that wait for the credits to roll over them.

 

Salt Stricken is Billy Bagilhole’s latest body of work and marks a significant new chapter for the artist – his first painted in oils and one which grapples with his own artistic journey. The paintings are at once highly specific – capturing childhood memories and the particulars of a real place many of us will never visit. But it is also an exhibition that has the capacity to speak to us all in its delicate handling of the themes of belonging and what home means. At the heart of Salt Stricken is an enquiry into whether we ever really leave a place behind and how our memories and feelings of home shape shift - coming in and out of focus - with each passing year.

 

Billy Bagilhole was born in North Wales in 1994. He grew up in a seaside town called Pwllheli named after tidal pools and coastal marshes – a place of salty air and land. As the artist explains, “to me, to be salt stricken is to live to where I’ve gotten to now, but still holding onto something of that Pwllheli boy.” Bagilhole lays bare reflections on his upbringing and what it means to the artist to be Welsh through work that moves between humour, grit, pathos stubbornness and grief.