Blobshop pt. 2

2015

Read Part 1 here (you’ll need context!)

I’ve been looking at my files so I could follow up my last post with some behind-the-scenes pictures from the blob era. Unretouched ones I didn’t post back then. I never deleted a single thing. That gives me an incredible archive to draw from, but it also means I have to sift through screenshots of every direct message that made me uncomfortable and every mean comment I was too thin-skinned to ignore. It reminded me of the times I got in my own way, the things I could have handled better if I’d thought them through. It’s a funny thing, revisiting the past. There is no escaping the fact that I may well live in many other people’s minds, forever, as a version of myself I wouldn’t choose now.

What happens when your big chance comes but you’re not ready?

Art school is meant to be a time for fucking up, trying out things that don’t work, and learning. It isn’t meant to be time for opportunity to arrive like a taxi with the engine running. When it did, I had to go - half-dressed, 9p in my bank account, essay due tomorrow. I had to make the most of it even if I was underprepared. What if the window closed, never to be opened again? I’d said no to Miley and I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

At its peak, my follower count reached around 35000 people. That number doesn’t sound huge now, but in 2015, the feed was chronological - followers actually saw what you posted. There were no reels, no suggested posts, no algorithmic churn. Instagram wasn’t optimised as a growth machine yet, but it encouraged me to become one myself. Every time I shared something, it felt like speaking to a stadium. What I didn’t share, of course, is that I’d started to fall apart. Bex Ilsley, the human, was broke and not feeling well, but that didn’t matter one bit, because @bexilsley was built to be an unstoppable machine! 💪

I promised myself I would say yes to every single opportunity I was offered in the future, like I was Danny Wallace in fucking Yes Man. No matter how mismatched, big, or messy, no matter how hard it was to follow through. I actively sought out open calls, competitions and collaborations. The goal was to build up a long CV for credibility at-a-glance, and I thought if I wasn’t everywhere all the time, I’d vanish. I told myself I was ironically playing at being an influencer. A fake influencer. A spy. I said yes to it all because that was content. Content gave me attention. Attention gave me value. One photo of me in a wig wasn’t art, but a hundred was. I didn’t even care if I liked the clothes I was sent, @bexilsley says yes. @bexilsley always takes the brand deal. Please like and share.

You might be thinking, Bex, that is insane behaviour. If you had no money and you were feeling overwhelmed and unwell, you should probably have taken care of that before you committed to exhibitions and commissions, because surely the work is going to suffer? And you’d be totally right. I write this not to whinge or pity myself - just to illustrate the cultural moment this story came from. The ecosystem I was in - online, hyper-accelerated, powered by validation metrics - didn’t reward self-care. It rewarded momentum, visibility, and performance. I had this poisonous grindset mentality. I saved memes in my phone that said things like ‘if you can’t stop thinking about it, don’t stop working for it’ and took that as literally as possible. If I stayed up all night hyper-fixating on a project, if I cried myself breathless, it just meant I was dedicated to my craft. If things felt unmanageable, it’s because I wasn’t manifesting hard enough. If I started to feel like I was losing my mind, I just needed to ‘trust the process’. Peace and positive vibes! 🌈☀️🌴✌️

I stopped eating because all I could think about was work. One of my tutors commented on my weight loss when I came back for my third year in September 2015. I took it as a win. It meant I was in control. It was probably better for engagement. I thought maybe I won’t have to agonise over every photo of myself online, if I’m skinny. I could be a statue, a tower, a cyborg, a thing. Maybe the Miley kids will stop commenting that I’m ugly. The thoughts were gross and insidious and decidedly un-feminist. It’s hard to look back at it.

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Sometime in early 2015, Wayne Coyne commented on one of my posts and suggested he wanted me to come to Oklahoma City and pour a blob on his roof. He had some existing metal domes with some melted-looking elements dripping down the side, but that they simply weren’t blobby enough for him. I could see what he meant. The idea was so exciting. I wanted to do it so much. There was no plan, no real parameters, just an idea: Do what you do, but do it here. Enthusiasm is a wonderful thing, but I’m fuelled by anxiety. I remember thinking okay - how do you pour a sculpture on someone’s roof? What if it goes wrong? What if it’s not weather-proof? Isn’t that like, tornado country? What if I fuck up his house??

I told him I didn’t want to commit without testing it at home first, so I proposed making a trial version with a view to repeating the process onsite once I was sure I’d get it right. He told me the real thing was six feet wide. I made one as big as I could, using what I had, to make sure I was on the right track. Wayne invited me to Sound City festival in Liverpool where the Flaming Lips were headlining that May, to talk about it more. It was an amazing day, getting to see how the shows work behind the scenes.

After that, he sent me £650 to buy materials and figure it out, which was amazing. I went shopping. I bought a 60” diameter water balloon, two 10 litre kits of polyurethane foam, a long stick, 5 litres of epoxy resin, several bags of mirror tiles, a few cans of silver spray paint, tarps, packs of Modroc plaster bandages, a big box of hot glue sticks, two glue guns and several mixing buckets.

The art school studios were closed for the summer, so I filled the balloon with air in my living room and used plaster bandages to make a dome from it. I thought back to the last time I did this - a childhood papier mâché project, only huge this time. That was my base. When I got access to the studios again in early September, I put it in the boot of a taxi and took it down Oxford Road to uni. I covered the floor in tarps and stacked two desks on top of one another with the dome on top. I stood on a chair and started pouring foam all over it. I cut pieces away and tried again when it went wrong. I sprayed it silver and glued mirror tiles on, one by one, to create the melted disco ball effect Wayne wanted.

It was a little difficult to get the tiles looking right on such an uneven surface, and when I sent a few pics, Wayne wasn’t keen on the size of them or the pattern I’d placed them in (he was right). I’d already spunked the budget by then and I couldn’t afford more, so I sat for hours hand-cutting each of the big ones into quarters with tile nippers.

I sent more pictures. He said it looked great and that I should cover the whole thing. I had nowhere near enough tiles for that, and I was confused, because I didn’t think that was necessary for a trial run. I told him I was broke and that hundreds more mirror tiles would cost a lot. He suggested I could ship him the one I’d made, but it wouldn’t even fit through the studio doors at that point. I think the size of the domes he had installed at home changed from six to ten feet, and that kind of negated everything I’d done so far, too.

Things broke down and fizzled out after that. There was no falling out, no official end. It was just too complicated. I had so much else going on. My work was changing, I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to say with it. I had a dissertation to write. My personal life was in shreds. I know Wayne didn’t mean any harm. He’s a visionary thinker who likes to take a big idea and just get it done. I like to take on big ideas and let them consume me.

I think the mistake I made was that I’d always come back to him with questions and barriers. I didn’t realise I was meant to work it out with my own ingenuity and come back with magic. I wasn’t supposed to make the dream feel heavy with needs, logistics, and hesitations. I wasn’t equipped. I wish I had been. I was a student artist being asked to make a large-scale sculpture for a rock star across international distance by text.

I think it’s worth reflecting on because it’s the kind of uneven dynamic I imagine happens more often than we admit in creative industries. It’s a kind of structural mismatch that appears when you’re young and hungry and trying to meet lofty ambitions with no buffers. It’s the reason so many of us fall through the cracks. I was offered something glittering but there was no scaffolding beneath it. I know I’m not the only one.

You’ve got to look after yourself.

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The best part of early Instagram was the intimacy. Strangers became friends, collaborators, sometimes they became lifelines. The worst part was how quickly attention came, and how stressful it felt when I wasn’t ready. Eventually, the feed stopped being chronological, connections thinned, people fell away and I think something essential got lost.

Blobshop faded like yesterday’s dream, like a pop song that never made the final cut. A hulking mirrored dome in a borrowed room I had to saw into pieces to dispose of.

I try not to think about the waste.

B