Part 1: Blobshop

2013 - 2016 / 2022 - 2022

What was Blobshop?

Between 2014 and 2016, I ran an online shop called Blobshop where I sold small blob sculptures I made - fluorescent, gooey, psychedelic forms - for £20–£25 each. They were made from expanding foam, pigments, and resin. They sat somewhere between artwork and ornament, between pop sculpture, merchandise, and post-internet artefact. I did this during my time at Manchester School of Art, and for a brief, surreal period, it kind of exploded. My work was shared by The Flaming Lips and Miley Cyrus, re-edited into fan memes, and caught up in a chaotic little corner of early 2010s social media art culture.

This is a personal reflection on that time - what it meant, what it cost, what I learned. I’m writing it down because I want the story to live somewhere outside my head. If you were there, or if you’re just curious, here it is.

The Beginning

In the Autumn of 2013 I began my first year of art school at Manchester School of Art. I’d started with making poured paintings and photographic experiments with liquid after seeing similar works I liked on tumblr - in particular, this one by Destiny Womack, though there were others too. I liked it because it was psychedelic, chance-based, and I’d just had a big 60’s oil-wheel-acid-art phase in 2012 when I was building my application portfolio.

I spent many hours trying to work out how to do this as organically as possible, finding the right materials to use. I wanted gravity to do its thing and reveal beauty to me, freezing a moment of fluid movement in time, on canvas or wood or metal.

I began to tire of them pretty quickly. They didn’t really say a lot, especially not anything new. While I was leaving a certain amount down to chance in those paintings, I still felt limited by flat surfaces that I had to tilt and tip and intervene on. I started to think - what if I could pour in three dimensions instead?

I had seen Lynda Benglis’ ‘Quartered Meteor’ at the Tate of course, I am not going to pretend she didn’t influence me hugely - and I’d seen Roxy Paine’s Scumak works and Louise Zhang’s sculptures online. I decided that was the direction I needed to go in.

I made my first blob sculpture in my studio space at art school in November 2013, using 2-part expanding foam and UV powder pigment so it would glow softly under blacklight. I’m not sure if I’d seen Benglis’ ‘Phantom’ yet or not. The UV fascination came more from my interest in 1960’s posters and 1990’s rave aesthetics. I’ve always been into garish stuff.

After the winter break, I made more. I made a few, all about 2ft tall, or thereabouts. They were created by mixing fluorescent pigments into the foam itself, or sprayed with chameleon car paint. I would then pour and paint on a layer or two of epoxy resin to make them glossy and seal the colour. I’d thought of that because I’d seen resin poured onto paintings - ones by Alex Echo in the window of my local Castle Fine Art in Leamington Spa - in 2012 before I moved to Manchester. I loved how it made it look shrinkwrapped, laminated, impossibly shiny.

At the same time, I was building up a little Instagram following, modest but engaged. A lot of that was to do with integrating myself into a community of artists and creative people surrounding the band The Flaming Lips, a band I love. I had a lot of valuable exchanges this way and a lot of inspiration. We’d do art trades and collaborations. I can’t list it all here, I’m not sure I could even remember now, but all of us liked and used lurid colour, all of us looking at the gooey, the splashy and the strange.

In late 2013 or early 2014, Andy Holden gave a talk at my uni and showed us his Totems for Thingly Time. I’m going to steal the description from the Arts Council’s collection:

The sculpture Totem for Thingly Time (IV) has been described by the artist as ‘part cake, part stalagmite, part pastel hangover’. Formed of dripping plaster, Holden explains that this work was an attempt to make an object that ‘revealed the time of its own construction’. He sees it as ‘something heavy, ambiguous, fallen out of the cartoon landscape, but related to place in the same way that a bird’s nest is.’

Naturally, I found these fascinating and beautiful and drew parallels with what I was trying to achieve. In the last image on Andy’s site, you can see smaller versions of these large pieces. He told us he used leftover plaster to pour over glass beer bottles and he sold them out the back of his van at the private view - ‘original multiples’. I loved that - how it circumvented the opaque world of gallery sales, a world that seemed completely unreachable and convoluted to me as a student. It was a cheeky and cool little comment on exiting through the gift shop. An accessible, affordable souvenir. Art as merch. Merch as art.

I was thinking too about the difference between the physical ‘sculpture’ and its representation online, the flat backlit image of it on the Instagram feed. It becomes something else then, doesn’t it?

So, inspired by Andy’s ideas, I made smaller blobs, 5 or 6 inches tall - just the right size for a desk or a bookshelf. I figured it could supplement my student income and make me less skint. I launched Blobshop online via social media and Bigcartel in February of 2014. They sold out, to online and offline friends and fellow artists around the world.

In May of 2014, I went to see The Flaming Lips play in Manchester and I took a gold glitter blob with me to give to Wayne Coyne. I think he’d already seen my work online at that point. He started following me on Instagram, which was a dream come true. This time in my life was really exciting. I felt like I’d finally found my language and my place.

Over the start of that summer, I made more. Further ‘drops’ happened throughout the first half of 2014 and they sold well. I was building a little following, bolstered by the support from Wayne, and it was helping me through school.

The Middle

In August 2014, I sent some white blobs to artist Oliver Hibert, who I’d connected with over Instagram. He painted some signature eyeballs on them as a little collaborative fun-thing-to-do. I would seek these kinds of opportunities out for connection and reach - mutual support. I liked to arrange trades. I received a lot of artwork from others in exchange for blob sculptures.

My memory is hazy, but I think Miley Cyrus - who was already collaborating with the Flaming Lips at this time (Oliver created the artwork for With a Little Help from My Fwends, the Lips’ Sgt Pepper’s cover album that Miley leant vocals to) was following Oliver on Instagram already, and this collaboration is what led her to see my stuff.

On 11th August, I woke up early because my phone was going insane. I could hear notifications coming through every second and I didn’t understand what was happening. Through half-stuck sleepy eyes, I realised Miley Cyrus had followed me on Instagram, along with 7500 others. 15000 new pairs of eyes. Everything had changed. I went for a shower. I was scared. I came back to a direct message.

So I asked for her address and I returned to art school for my second year, as very serious student and self-appointed queen of the Grosvenor building. I was trying to think about what all this meant and how it could be used, what I was going to say in crits. I’d already been thinking about the process a sculpture goes through when a photo is taken and uploaded online, from object to representational image. I was thinking about the difference, or the grey area, between proper art and mere décor.

Mostly though, I was thinking about all of those new eyes on me - more and more each day. The first thing I did was take my photos of my little blobs and made them into repeating patterns to be used on merchandise - cheap extras I could upsell. Stickers, pins, posters and compact mirrors. A looped, regurgitated journey from matter to data and back again. I also uploaded the patterns to Print All Over Me so I could sell blob prints on clothes.

I got a box together for Miley - some blob sculptures and extras, a t-shirt or two. She stuck the stickers on her laptop and she posted photos of the blobs. She sent me photos of her biting them. By December of 2014, she’d taken my poster print and had it made into a repeating pattern and then WALLPAPERED HER BATHROOM WITH IT. She emailed me photos two days before Christmas. This was surreal for me. It still is!

Every time she posted, I was flooded with comments from her young fanbase. They would ask what are these? how do you make them? what do they do? why do they exist, if they’re useless? I got so many I printed them out and made them into wallpaper - like Miley had done in her bathroom - for one of my second year assessments.

Then, there was this amazing symbiotic thing that would happen. Miley would post, and her fans - ‘smilers’ - would make ‘edits’. They’d include things they knew she liked, references to her visual world at the time - it was all a kind of hodgepodge, maximalist, 2010’s post-Internet, seapunk-adjacent, weed-pizza-unicornpoolfloat-core aesthetic. Collages made quickly with apps. Stickers, gifs, acid smileys. She would sometimes post her favourites, so she would get tagged in hundreds of them. My work - and later my face - would appear in these remixes too. This was both amazing and disturbing to me - my work so far removed from it’s original form that it was truly something else entirely. It was a fan culture meme now, eaten and regurgitated a hundred times over.

I started thinking about how I, too, was different online to the way I was in my body, in the real world. How I would flatten and translate myself for consumption. That wasn’t a revelatory thought, even in 2015, I knew that, but I wondered if I could turn my Instagram feed into a space for performance, a way to comment on the shallow self-branding of the Instagram artist. I’d read Athletic Aesthetics. I grappled a lot about whether mimicry alone can truly critique something.

I also felt the need, for my sanity, to create some kind of barrier between me and the chaos of the comment section - a sort of hyperreal avatar called Bex Ilsley who would stand between me and all this attention, something untouchable and distant, laced with pastel positivity, taking cues from the visual language Miley’s fans used. In 2015, that felt somewhat fresh, I guess, alongside artists I admired, like Molly Soda.

In the first half of 2015, I also started to play with shapes and other materials in my sculptural experiments. I worked on my execution. They got smoother, sleeker. I made blobs that dripped downwards, I made gigantic ones 6 feet wide. I remember the day I managed to make the first drippy one, in March 2015, because it took some figuring out and I was so pleased with it. It involved tipping and coaxing the rapidly solidifying foam down a vertical sheet of greaseproof paper I could then peel away to preserve the drips.

In April 2015, I made a few more.

I’ve gone back and forth in my head about writing this next part, but I will, because it’s the truth.

In September 2015, an artist mutual contacted me to ask if I’d trade that trio of blobs above in exchange for work of theirs - similarly colourful, wall based pieces made from similar materials. I agreed.

I never received anything from them, but that person is now - a decade later - very well known for making work very similar to the above (albeit much more polished and finished). They do it very well. They began this shift in their work in December 2015.

I understand the idea of influence, taking something and honing it, swallowing it up and translating it into something your own. There’s plenty of that in this story, after all. It’s part of what art is.

I will say that it pains me sometimes to think about what could have been, if I’d had the funds, if I’d had the time, if I’d had better mental health in my 20s, if I’d found a way to focus, stick with them and develop them. I think if I had carried on making blobs like this, it would have looked quite a lot like what that person makes now and has enjoyed phenomenal success with. Maybe.

Maybe I only had the early sketches in me, the prototypes, rough ideas that didn’t know how to market themselves properly, and theirs is the final version. That’s alright too. I know what hindsight is, and I can laugh at myself about that. I felt strongly that my blobs should be affordable for everyone - especially for Miley’s young fans. I didn’t realise I was also preventing the work from ever being viewed as valuable. As art. Ultimately, uni life was a struggle, these materials weren’t cheap. I had other ideas that were more interesting to me, pressure from tutors to make things that had more to say - something that could be intellectualised. Pressure on myself to do the same.

To my knowledge, that person has never acknowledged that I influenced them. I say this with as much humility as I can muster, but looking at the timeline, it is difficult not to wonder. I can’t say it doesn’t sting, on bad days, when that person is tagged on my old posts - ‘this looks like one of yours!’ - or when that person’s artwork appears alongside my own in image searches - see similar results.

Ah well. Life really does go on.

In that summer of 2015, I made blob variations from casting plastic and plaster and silicone. I made one covered in plastic eyeballs that I could insert my legs into, a kind of tongue-in-cheek reference to The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife and the way I was starting to feel about my relationship with expanding foam and the endless online gaze. I made one I could puke, like the foam was invading my body from multiple angles.

Making Instagram such a central part of my practice was taking its toll on my head. I knew I was basing much of my self-esteem on positive reactions and keeping myself relevant to a growing audience that weren’t even the audience I was trying to speak to. I was mainlining dopamine through my phone and it was turning me into a twat. I couldn’t post freely anymore, couldn’t share mistakes or messy momemts or failed experiments, for fear of backlash and shattering the illusion I was trying to build. Everything had to be glossy and perfect and ready-to-ship. That’s what I’m grappling with, above.

The End

In early July 2015, Miley contacted me and my friend Zara - owner of Keep it Bright, to ask if we would produce artwork for an unknown project. I was put in touch with a digital marketing director at Maverick Management.

--

We are working on a project and after seeing your amazing blobs at Miley’s house I thought they would be perfect creatively to use as part of the design. Do you have them as PDF files, or as like a wall paper that we can tweak? I’m not exactly sure what format the design team needs but I’m hoping to find out tomorrow.

--

When I responded with some of the repeating patterns I’d already made for my own merchandise, they asked if any of it was custom-made for Miley. When I said no, they asked if I could make a new, exclusive version they could license for usage. I said I could, no problem. I asked some clarifying questions about what they wanted and I gave an estimated time frame for completion.

--

We are interested in doing a buyout on these exclusive blob designs, so that Miley would own the rights to use them as needed in the future. Please let me know what the cost of this would be, both for creating and owning the rights to the designs, and I’ll work on getting it approved by business management.

--

Now, as a student in my second year of art school, who was not in any way business-minded or used to negotiating this kind of thing, I had no idea how to answer that question. I asked around. I asked my tutors and a few working artists I knew. Nobody had a black-and-white equation I could use. Nobody could tell me how to price my work for this. I was clueless, so I responded -

I'll admit I've never sold full copyright before and I don't know how to name a price without knowing the extent to which the design could be used. I have been seeking some advice from trusted artists and designers I know (in general terms, of course) so I have some idea but it seems this is always dependent on the usage. do you have any more details on that yet? Could you tell me what your budget for artwork is for the project?

--

We don’t currently have any plans to use the blobs for anything beyond this initial website project, so I don’t have more details the usage. However we do need to be covered in the event that this changes 6 months from now. We can offer you $500 for the custom blob designs, with all the rights to use them in perpetuity.

--

Since there’s no indication of how the designs could be used in the future, I have to consider the potential of that and assume it may be widespread commercial application. I’m also aware that an artist of Miley’s standing shifts a lot of units and if you were to use my design on any commercial products then I’d want to negotiate an amount that is a fair reflection of the expected sales. Obviously I’m not looking for some delusional and unreasonable sale price at all, but from speaking to others who have sold copyright for use by musicians, $500 does seem low for full rights.

If there are no plans to use the design beyond a launch website then I’d like to propose exclusive licensing of the designs to you instead for a one-off fee of $500 for that specific use. If you need to use the designs for something else later on down the line then we could discuss the sale of the full rights at a later date once this need becomes apparent.

If licensing doesn’t work for you, let me know, as I’m still open to negotiating a figure for full rights at this point.

--

Sorry for the delay. There have been some creative changes happening and I wanted to get a straight answer before replying. It looks like we’re going in another direction at this point, so I don’t think we’ll be needing the custom blobs any more :(

--

That was the end of the Miley chapter. They said the reason for the lowball offer was because the album was being released outside of Miley’s contract with RCA, so there was no budget. I still wonder sometimes if I fucked up. I read this back now, ten years later, and I ask myself if I threw away the opportunity of a lifetime.

In August 2015, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz was released and went on to become a cult milestone in independent pop - bold, weird, and high-profile. I love the album. It’s raw and mad and takes me straight back in time. I read these emails back and I flit between two opposing views - that my instincts were correct and I was right to turn down $500 for the full rights to the only intellectual property I really had at the time - work that meant everything to me. Another part of me wonders - Did I throw away an incredible opportunity because I lacked the tools to negotiate? Could I have coped with that level of exposure and momentum at that stage in my life anyway? What I keep with me is that I know I played a small part in shaping a little corner of popular culture. I’m on a moodboard, somewhere in the past. That’s more than I could ever have dreamed of when I was a child. I am still grateful, forever, to Miley, for promoting my work. I wouldn’t have gone on to do what I did after without that. I don’t think she had any idea about these discussions.

What’s painfully ironic is that I moved away from making blobs after that anyway, so it wouldn’t really have mattered. It had come to its natural conclusion. My work became much more about self-portraiture - costumed facets of myself I created, that felt more authentic to me, somehow, than the person awkwardly shuffling around Manchester, glued to a phone. That’s something I’ll write about another day.

In December of 2016, one of the blob images somehow ended up in Adbusters, on a Donald Trump collage captioned ‘pussygrabber’, mistaken for a royalty-free graphic. A hilarious conclusion to their journey. They were great about it though, they printed a correction in the masthead of the next issue and gave me a years’ free subscription!

I came back to blobmaking briefly in the years after, but as parts of other things. It wasn’t possible to keep Blobshop going when my living situation was so precarious - multiple HMOs in various cities while I crashed and screamed through life - and I had no money for a permanent studio.

I worked collaboratively with students at Kendall Collage of Art and Design with my friend Natalie at her space The Moon in 2016, for a video project directed by Bokeh Monster. We made some blob headwear for that.

I made some to support a TV screen for Castlefield Gallery’s ...in Dark Times in early 2017.

This piece existed until it was sent to Belgium for another show, and one of the blobs fell out the back of a truck somewhere!

The Beginning (Again)

In 2021, I started thinking about what I could do to make this work feel like I owned it again, not something absorbed into the feed and forgotten. What could I do differently? I always loved the idea of making a transparent blob, and I’d been doing a few experiments with casting, like this surreal cartoon breakfast I made for fun during the covid lockdown.

The second iteration of Blobshop launched in October 2022 with minimal fanfare and little response. Years of slow posting and a severely reduced level of engagement with Instagram meant I was greeted with a punishingly low-priority place in the new algorithm-driven feeds. I could not - would not - put in the level of effort required to claw my way back to the top. I cringed at the thought of making a reel or using a trending audio. It felt humiliating and my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t need to make them to survive anymore, having succumbed to full-time work in web development, so there was no need to force myself to play the game. I wasn’t willing to manipulate algorithms for attention I no longer craved. I really only wanted to prove to myself that I could do it and make it feel like mine again, rather than an idea that had been co-opted or diffused into something else.

I’m so pleased with how they came out after 18 months of trial and error. I love them.

Thanks for reading.

Bex

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