bexilsley.com ✴

Hello. I’m Bex and I used to be an artist, though I suppose you could say I still am, depending on how you might think about it.

I’ve made quite a few things in several ways over the years, from sculpture to different types of ‘digital’ art.

Broadly, my work was about fantasy, performance, objecthood, recursion and paradox. It’s about the thing you invent as a barrier between you and the world, living one-step-removed from yourself, being your own puppeteer. I try to examine the authenticity of my own identity and of Things. What does it means to have a ‘sense of self’? Where is the line between real and virtual, self and other, artifice and sincerity?

I explored those thoughts through stuff I happen to love, like online trends and oddities, psychedelia, colour, screens and mirrors, magical girl anime, nostalgia, amorphous forms and manufactured body parts - all fragmented, sanitised, malleable, thing-like.

This site used to be a portfolio but now it’s an archive and a space for me to reflect on a time in my life that was wonderful, wild and hard.

Thanks, truly, for reading.

︎︎︎ Email
︎︎︎ Instagram
︎︎︎ Elementum
︎︎︎ Daata
bexilsley.com ✴

Hello. I’m Bex and I used to be an artist, though I suppose you could say I still am, depending on how you might think about it.

I’ve made quite a few things in several ways over the years, from sculpture to different types of ‘digital’ art.

Broadly, my work was about fantasy, performance, objecthood, recursion and paradox. It’s about the thing you invent as a barrier between you and the world, living one-step-removed from yourself, being your own puppeteer. I try to examine the authenticity of my own identity and of Things. What does it means to have a ‘sense of self’? Where is the line between real and virtual, self and other, artifice and sincerity?

I explored those thoughts through stuff I happen to love, like online trends and oddities, psychedelia, colour, screens and mirrors, magical girl anime, nostalgia, amorphous forms and manufactured body parts - all fragmented, sanitised, malleable, thing-like.

This site used to be a portfolio but now it’s an archive and a space for me to reflect on a time in my life that was wonderful, wild and hard.

Thanks, truly, for reading.


︎︎︎ Email
︎︎︎ Instagram
︎︎︎ Elementum
︎︎︎ Daata

“Emotional Processing”


a body of work from 2017


first shown at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery




1. Character Building
steel, mdf, mannequin legs, TV, .mp4









Below: on view for We Sing the Body Electric, Gallery 46






2. The Heaviest Weight
perspex, vinyl print, mannequin arm, hula hoop, molymod (serotonin), ipad, .mp4






3. There was a time when I would go walking backwards ‘round the world
laminate tabletop, stress boob, pool noodles, plinth, plastic eyeball, pipe




4. There will always be a part of me that is for you
trampoline, mirror, nail technician’s training hand, selfie stick, smartphone, .mp4









  
© 2025 ✴ Bex Ilsley