Billie Adele O'Regan

RHA Graduate Studio Award

Billie Adele O'Regan is a contemporary artist whose practice celebrates femininity while defiantly challenging patriarchal constraints. A graduate of MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, with a First Class Honours BA (Hons) in Fine Art, she creates paintings that explore the grotesque, the monstrous feminine, and the transgressive potential of the female body.

Influenced by the occult, sci-fi and horror aesthetics, and strange beauty contraptions from past and present, Billie constructs uncanny, suspended realities where amorphous female forms resist containment and confront systems of control. Her work satirises the chaotic and absurd nature of beauty as ritual, merging macabre humour, theatricality and visceral materiality to transform painting into a performative and alchemical act of becoming.

Grounded in the belief that the body inhabits the spirit, her practice engages in an alchemy of paint, flesh, spirit and lived experience, where paint itself becomes collaborator, a living, shapeshifting vessel of emotion, transformation and resistance. This work engages with and empathises with the monstrous, recognising it as a symbol of transmutable power, tenderness and survival. Through these materially charged worlds, Billie reimagines the grotesque as liberation itself: fluid, embodied and defiantly alive.