Bruce Asbestos: Cranky Pants
Cranky Pants is about making space for feelings that don’t usually get much airtime, being awkward, loud, silly, contradictory. Accessibility for me is about opening it up so different kinds of people can find themselves in it. That sense of space to play and try-out feels both increasingly rare, and increasingly necessary.
Bruce Asbestos
Artist
Bruce Asbestos. Photo © Tate (Lucy Dawkins).
Bruce Asbestos’ work centres on attention, and how visibility, spectacle, and participation shape pop culture. Working across sculpture, performance, painting, clothing, and large-scale installation, his practice uses characters and pop imagery to explore how audiences gather, follow, and engage within cultural systems.
Drawing from popular culture, art history, fashion, and folklore, Asbestos develops playful yet highly structured environments that mix everyday materials with spectacle and excess. Formats such as the catwalk, social media, and live performance are used not simply as platforms, but as tools for organising behaviour, producing momentum, and testing how participation operates at scale.
Humour and play are central to the work, but function less as decoration than as mechanisms that generate repetition, accumulation, and collective experience. Characters recur across projects, acting as interfaces through which ideas of identity, fantasy, commerce, and shared global culture are circulated and reworked. Recent works increasingly foreground how joy and accessibility are mobilised by institutions, and what it costs to sustain attention over time.
Bruce Asbestos earned a degree in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University, winning a scholarship at Musashino University, Tokyo, and went on to the Hive business school. He obtained a Master’s Degree at Nottingham Trent, during which he was awarded a scholarship at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Recent projects and exhibitions include, S/S 2025, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, Eye of Newt, Mega Bunny SXSW, Texas, USA – Bangkok Biennale, Thailand, Hooboos Hoobar Ah Haa School of Art, Colorado, Hooboos, Factory International, Mega Bunny & Friends, SPILL Festival, Bootleg Shreg & Friends, Humber Street Gallery, Eye of Newt 2.0 QUAD, Derby, New British Informal, Browns East, London, Burple Purple, Recent Activity, Birmingham, Ok! Cherub! Bluecoat, Liverpool, A/W 2018 Nottingham Contemporary, Arts Council International Fund project to NYC and Philadelphia, A-B Testing, Concrete, Hayward Gallery, London. MTN DEW, ‘Sunscreen’, Venice Biennale. He was nominated for the £300,000 Paul Hamlyn Breakthrough Fund. Bruce Asbestos artworks have been accessioned into the Government Art Collection, and the collection of the National Justice Museum.
Cranky Pants is supported by Healthway promoting social emotional wellbeing and the arts. Art connects us to ourselves, each other and our communities, helping to create a healthy Western Australia.
