In the landscaped grounds of Ilam Park, a National Trust property near Ashbourne in Derbyshire’s Peak District, a large dayglo orange mole seems to have surfaced from the gently rolling grounds near the stately facade of the main house. Its eyes are bright and sparkling, its features placid, as though pleased with both its situation and itself. The outline of Thorpe Cloud peak in the near distance seems appropriated into the work like a very large molehill behind it. ‘Pepperpot Mole’ (2025) gives off a contradictory air of being both oddly out of place – a garishly bright cartoon emanating from the manicured garden landscape against an overcast grey drizzle (or perhaps a summery blue sky, depending on the day) – while also remaining grounded and site specific, designed to echo the shape and proportions of an existing folly known locally as ‘The Pepperpot’, out of sight, but only a short walk away.
Like much of Bruce Asbestos’s recent work, consisting of large scale inflatables that depict cartoonish characters like the Hooboos, Mega Bunny and Egg Cat, ‘Pepperpot Mole’ has an obvious appeal to children and visiting families. These characters take some of their design cues from children’s books like Roger Hargreave’s Mr Men or Dick Bruna’s Miffy, or the many character products made by companies like Sanrio, most famously Hello Kitty, Pompompurin and Keroppi: the cute plushie toys and merchandisable product lines endlessly generated by international juggernaut franchises like South Korea’s Pinkfong and Japan’s Pokémon are equally influential here. ‘Pepperpot Mole’ introduces a few new elements to Asbestos’s existing parade of inflatables, in its scale, its solid painted plywood construction and its functionality as a working shelter, with an inviting deep blue shaded interior, but the mole itself fits right in with its various inflatable predecessors.
Yet for all the surface level accessibility of ‘Pepperpot Mole’ and its ever expanding cast of companions, there is something subtly off or potentially unsettling about Asbestos’s versions of these quasi-corporate character designs. With their variously glum expressions or forced, uncomfortably happy faces, slumped or overly assertive postures, not to mention existences detached from any known backstory or justifying IP, they reflect a certain ambivalence about the precise nature of these superficially cosy but insanely profitable avatars of innocence and childish joy. Even as they embrace their own ambivalence however, these characters are clearly lovable and their frequent deployment in the context of family and children’s programming at galleries and other art institutions has provided plenty of evidence that they work in precisely this way for such audiences. Put simply, children love them. But perhaps they can also be viewed as objects with a sometimes dual nature, in ways that another National Trust commission this summer makes clear.
In the lavishly decorated interior of the National Trust property of Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham, a pair of what can only be described as ‘cute shark or maybe alligator cakes’ are set to eye up visitors with teeth bared, like a couple of renegade antagonists from a Super Mario game suddenly transposed into the real world of an intricately decorated heritage interior with an ornate checkerboard floor – as though a pair of cartoon villains have been set against a sixties Bridget Riley Op Art painting. Consisting of inflatable cake slices with prominent eyes and jam-red crimson teeth, fabricated at a slightly intimidating scale, ‘Final Boss’ (2025) could be argued to contain an explicit suggestion of consumer capitalist critique in the work’s obviously, if comically, predatory appearance.
Asbestos himself notes that his inflatable duo – and the Wentworth Woodhouse interior they occupy – reminded him strongly of the kind of cutesy ‘boss rooms’ encountered in the various iterations of Super Mario, where players must defeat a particularly challenging antagonist of one sort or another to reach the next level of the game. Whether we choose to take this as a literal pop cultural resonance, (as those familiar with the games themselves might), or read it as an element in a sly critique of consumer capitalism, (as viewers more familiar with the histories of pop culture and the strategies of contemporary art might), is left entirely up to us. The point isn’t forced.
Even so, for Asbestos it is evident that there are a couple of decades of thinking about pop culture and the histories of Modernism and contemporary art informing these works. A recent commission for the UNIQLO Tate Play series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern resulted in ‘Dash’ (2025), a large scale inflatable snail, again with some comic but pointedly prominent teeth. ‘Dash’ was made partly in response to Henri Matisse’s ‘The Snail’ (1953), an iconic modernist work, arguably one of the most famous in Tate’s collection, and partly as another character in his ongoing series of inflatables. When ‘Dash’ was displayed in the Turbine Hall back in April it shared the location with Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Maman’ (1999), the largest in her late series of gigantic black spiders, with which Asbestos’s creation appeared to forge a briefly common purpose: a brightly coloured, unruly cartoon offspring to her looming sculptural presence on the walkway overlooking the space.
That these allusions and connections span both popular culture and contemporary art seems to be the inevitable outcome of a life and body of work that has always been steeped in both. As Asbestos has stated himself, ‘the idea of work that references popular culture is of less interest than work making an attempt at being or becoming a kind of popular culture in its own right.’ There are obvious resonances with things going on in the realms of social media, gaming, Korean and American animation or comics and (self-evidently, of late) Japanese Sanrio merchandise, but Asbestos’s work has tended to develop through a kind of voracious immersion in all of these things. Rather than a conceptual gesture predicated on differentials in cultural status, like Andy Warhol appropriating soup cans or Roy Lichtenstein’s use of comic book panels as the material for respectable forms like painting, Asbestos seems more inclined, if also ambivalent, towards the approach exemplified by Takashi Murakami back in the early 2000s, with his seamless ubiquity and glides between the art and commercial design worlds, the limited edition and the promotional toy, the gallery wall and the Kanye West album cover.
Asbestos once theorised all this as ‘Flat Culture’, a realm where art could take any form and appear on any platform, but over the last few years, he’s become less sure that contemporary art is still the most viable or productive realm for him to operate in; noting that the kinds of context and framework – not to mention the support structures and funding possibilities – that he first emerged into from art school twenty-odd years ago seem to be almost entirely gone.
‘I keep wondering – is contemporary art dead?’, he explains. ‘The structures of the art world as I think we knew it are crumbling, that whole framework for making work seems to be mostly dead or dying. I’m thinking of how thin some of the neo-Pop stuff shown in galleries and at art fairs is now’, he adds, ‘…and how blurry the line has become between actual pop culture and the older idea of art. You get someone like Beyonce drawing on work by an artist like Pipilotti Rist in her videos and it can seem very close, except that the budgets and financing behind the pop side of that are so much greater, meaning that the actual art can’t compete. Everything becomes content, pitched at algorithms, which doesn’t leave much room for the interesting, small-scale, slightly weird stuff that is almost always where new ideas come from.’
Perhaps it’s symptomatic that Asbestos’s long term involvement with curating wrapped up its operations a few years ago. Trade Gallery was first established in 2008 in Nottingham’s Sneinton area, where artists like Ruth Beale, Stuart Sherman, Rachel Maclean, Pil & Galia Kollectiv and Bank, showcased work at the now defunct One Thoresby Street studio complex with an emphasis on film, live performance and digital intervention. In its later years, from around 2016, Trade Gallery operated on a smaller scale, out of a room in the artist’s own studio at Primary, a visual art space and studio complex in a former primary school building on the Radford side of the city. The move marked Asbestos’s low key curatorial pivot into painting, drawing and object-based exhibitions by artists like Urara Tsuchiya, Cara Nahaul, Daniel Sean Kelly, Alex Xerri and Sooim Jeong.
By his own admission, Trade’s programme at once followed and informed his own particular interests in contemporary art, and his approaches shifted over the years from projects like the YouTube TV series Social Media Takeaway (2013), a kind of celebration of the early potential of social media as a medium for art, to an ongoing series of live, digitally animated and often very hand made and participatory fashion catwalk shows, built around a variety of themes. These launched with a Hansel & Gretel themed performative catwalk show at Nottingham Contemporary in 2018 and have appeared in a range of venues and formats at regular intervals since: Asbestos staged his most recent, loosely snail-themed, participatory catwalk show alongside ‘Dash’ in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in April.
Painting, another of Asbestos’s interests reflected in Trade’s programme, continues to be a presence in his work, from the making of self contained images, and the deployment of paintings as elements accompanying fashion shows or displays of inflatables, to a source of material and imagery for reconfiguration as saleable merchandise. A toothsome edition of fluorescent green croc socks (that may or may not be sold out by now) were derived from a joyously slapdash painting of a crocodile back in 2021. T-shirts of inflatable characters like Hooboo and Octopus, are available, with very appealing prototype plushie toys in production of two more: Hooboo and Mega Bunny, already extant at his studio, and set to be available for purchase at some future point. Asbestos’s summer 2024 exhibition at Nottingham’s Djanogly Gallery, Monster Fun, even included a bespoke, fully stocked and functional merch shop.
I visited Asbestos’s studio while ‘Pepperpot Mole’ was under construction in early July. The walls were lined with large-scale bubble-wrapped paintings of cartoonish cats, colourfully abstracted wigs and at least one monochrome line painting of a slightly misshapen figure. Asbestos’s curatorial interests, as made visible in Trade Gallery’s programmes, retain a presence in the work he’s making today, albeit with new spins and perspectives.
Perhaps one driver of these recent changes has been the onset of parenthood and middle age, at least one part of that equation bringing a greater emphasis on having fun and not worrying so much about how the work is seen by the standard measures of the art world. Another might be the necessary adjustments that have been required to continue working in the contexts that artists have been forced to navigate through the long years of disinvestment and safety net removal that have only accelerated since 2008. The perfect destructive storm of 2020 onwards that has not only prevailed for now but seemingly consolidated itself as a brutal working norm for the foreseeable future, has made none of it easy.
‘I’m not sure at the moment if I’m still trying to be an artist, or really just trying to get away from art and become something else altogether,’ Asbestos explains. ‘Maybe contemporary art isn’t really dying, and things will change, and something new will emerge, but we’re not there yet, and I don’t know what that might be or what form it could take.’ Perhaps those predatory cartoon cake slices in ‘Final Boss’, and that benignly emergent ‘Pepperpot Mole’, offering shelter from the ever more unstable climate as best it can manage, are just two further stages in this process of diagnosis: provisional and unpretentious, answering to questions about art’s potential value and purpose in a cultural and economic landscape undergoing tectonic shifts.
Mole Hole: Pepperpot The Mole is on at Ilam Park until 2 November
Final Boss is on at Wentworth Woodhouse, 5th August to 16th November
Wayne Burrows is a writer based at Primary, Nottingham.
This feature is supported by Bruce Asbestos.
Published 16.08.2025 by Rachel Graves in Features
2,113 words
