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.
04 You are on the west end of the beach.
A game I played with my dad in 1995 wouldn’t let me go.
Part 4 is about what I’m working on right now.
I wanted to fix a childhood memory, and ended up deep in a digital dig-site, reverse-engineering a mostly-forgotten piece of history.
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21st June 2025
03 Are You Still Watching?
What happens when you become the work, then fall apart in front of it?
Between 2015 and 2020, I made livestreams, wore latex, burnt out and broke bones.
Here, I’m tracing the arc of objecthood and collapse, and trying to figure out how to claw autonomy back after turning myself into a tool.
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12th June 2025
02 Blobshop (2)
Some bonus content regarding Blobshop I wrote to further explore the way I was feeling at the time.
It’s about when opportunities come at the wrong time, about remembering to look after yourself, and it includes a fun story about the time I didn’t get to make a mess on a roof in Oklahoma City.
Read more
Some bonus content regarding Blobshop I wrote to further explore the way I was feeling at the time.
It’s about when opportunities come at the wrong time, about remembering to look after yourself, and it includes a fun story about the time I didn’t get to make a mess on a roof in Oklahoma City.
Read more
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4th June 2025
01 Blobshop
Once upon a time, I made neon goo blobs in my art school studio and I shipped them around the world for £25 each. Then Miley Cyrus followed me on Instagram and things got complicated.
It took me from a student nobody to 35k followers on Instagram over the course of one summer in 2014.
A decade later, I’ve decided to write the story down. A little micro-era of Instagram art, fan culture and student struggles, remembered in my own words.
Read more
Once upon a time, I made neon goo blobs in my art school studio and I shipped them around the world for £25 each. Then Miley Cyrus followed me on Instagram and things got complicated.
It took me from a student nobody to 35k followers on Instagram over the course of one summer in 2014.
A decade later, I’ve decided to write the story down. A little micro-era of Instagram art, fan culture and student struggles, remembered in my own words.
Read more
︎
31st May 2025