A one pound plastic cup from a Lewisham charity store,

holding nasturtiums grown in my mum’s garden,

A green scoop and pink plate found at the Red Cross shop when I first came home.

I’ve bought these things together and sat them with a ceramic lemon,

things from all different homes, I’ve reimagined them to be as one,

Like when you catch a glance through someone’s window walking past.

Hiding behind a synthetic curtain,

I made my own fantasy world for them in colour.

Billie Culy (b. 1994) a full time artist based in Ahuriri, Napier, examines traditional still life painting and attempts to reconfigure it’s treatment of colours and textures into the medium of photography. Her images are both records of time spent in suburban and coastal communities, as well as carefully composed explorations of pigment, light and collected objects. Culy’s work explores notions of memory and nostalgia, they are at once a nod to the historical, as they are an attempt to break free from the conventions of traditional still life, blurring the line between photography and painting. Culy’s most recent works are borne out of her fascination with the objects found at second hand stores. Re imaging them in people’s homes to create a sort of fantasy of what might have been.

“There are those brief moments when you do get a snapshot of people’s lives outside of your own, like when you glance into the window of someone’s house when you’re walking by, you get that little glimpse of their life - a curtain, an object on a window sill. I attempt to reflect those fleeting moments in my work, the mysteries hidden in each object, things that have had a life, been worn by many bodies or held in many hands. Combining all these things I find, I like putting them in to a new context and seeing how they speak to each other”.