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.
“in search of warmer climes”
Commissioned by Warwick Arts Centre for It Gets Lighter From Here
a collaborative cultural experience from the West Midlands Culture Response Unit consisting of 1-minute short films by artists from the area
2020