PERTH.- The Art Gallery of Western Australia opened Cranky Pants, a bold new interactive exhibition, created in collaboration with UK artist Bruce Asbestos. This vibrant pop art playground invites visitors of all ages to embrace the full spectrum of human emotion, especially the cranky, chaotic and delightfully disobedient parts we’re usually encouraged to hide.
Stepping into AGWA’s Gallery 09, families and individuals of all ages are invited to design hyper-couture costumes and accessories. Visitors then reveal their new identities on a pop-up catwalk flanked by four larger than life wooden sculptures combining a riot of colour, character and monster energy that dare audiences to play.
Cranky Pants celebrates creativity and design through frustration, silliness and contradiction. The exhibition gives people permission to be expressive, imperfect and a little bit ridiculous. The result is a living, self-contained world where crankiness becomes a catalyst for experimentation, humour and inclusive storytelling.
“This is unbridled, chaotic and delicious creativity,” explains AGWA’s Head of Learning and Creativity Research, Lilly Blue.
“At its heart, Cranky Pants is an invitation to expand emotional range and experiment with identity expression. We invite visitors to explore alter egos and dual identities through irreverent costume design and performance, rejecting preconceived ideas of perfection and prettiness,” said Blue.
Audiences of all ages will be welcomed by Super Crank’s wide-open mouth offering the perfect entrance to a design studio stocked with lovingly adapted curious materials that have been altered, tended, and transformed with zips, snaps, hooks and other fastenings. Visitors become both the artist, artwork and performer through hands-on transformation of materials into wearable designs for the catwalk.
By embracing the messy, contradictory parts of ourselves, the exhibition creates a welcoming space where visitors can explore identity, self-expression and belonging.
Asbestos’ practice has long explored cartoon characters with emotional nuance, moving beyond simple happy-sad binaries into creatures that are charming, unsettling and wonderfully ambiguous. Cranky Pants channels this energy into a communal experience that challenges expectations of emotional regulation in institutional spaces. Instead, it proposes a gallery environment where authenticity, play and creative risk-taking are not only allowed but celebrated.
“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,” said Bruce Asbestos.
Presented with the support of Healthway, this new Gallery 09 offering reinforces AGWA’s commitment to creating accessible, inclusive and joyfully unconventional experiences nurturing the wellbeing of Western Australians of all ages through the arts.
Bruce Asbestos is an artist producing large-scale, participatory and spatial projects that draw on pop culture, fashion, folklore, and contemporary image economies. His work uses humour, spectacle, and bold visual language to create shared encounters that operate across art, public space, and institutional contexts.
His projects are designed to work at scale and within complex delivery environments, often involving large numbers of participants and collaborators. Recent works have engaged audiences of over 27,000 people at Tate Modern and more than 65,000 visitors through a major public sculpture in Ilam Park.
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.
Bruce has presented work internationally, including at Tate Modern (London), the Venice Biennale, the Hayward Gallery, SXSW (USA), and the Bangkok Biennale, and has worked with organisations including the National Trust. His work is held in the Government Art Collection and the National Justice Museum.
