“You’re never alone”

Beth Evans in conversation with Jason Wilsher-Mills 

Jason Wilsher-Mills is an artist from Wakefield. His exhibition ‘Jason and the adventure of 254’ is being shown at the Wellcome Collection until 12 January 2025. At the age of eleven, Jason was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that paralysed him from the neck down. The doctors told Jason’s parents that he would not live to the age of sixteen. He was diagnosed at 2:54pm on 1 August 1980, as he watched the 1500m men’s race at the Moscow Olympics in which British athlete Seb Coe won the race bearing the number 254.  

Now, over forty years later, Jason reflects on the year he lived in Pinderfields Hospital. Encapsulating what it was like becoming disabled as a child, he has created a space filled with nostalgia, magical realism and creativity. 

I was lucky enough to sit down with Jason and ask him all about his exhibition, his inspirations and how art can be used as a creative outlet for pain and disability.  

Early Life and Artistic Vision

Could you introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your exhibition and the inspiration behind it? 

My name is Jason Wilsher-Mills. I’m an artist who creates work about disability and childhood trauma. I do it in a way that’s kind of humorous because in my head I pretend that I’m working for The Beano in the 1970s and I’ve gone down a Marxist activist route, producing content for them about disability. 

So, all the work that I create is influenced by that working-class aesthetic from the 1970s, growing up in a council estate and watching lots of telly. It’s also about being bright and interested in ideas and subsequently becoming disabled at the age of eleven. My work is psychically landlocked in childhood. It’s about those issues of how one deals with and navigates illness. And in my case, it was apparently terminal. I wasn’t supposed to be around. And here I am, an old fart looking like Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses.  

Creating a Child’s Wonderland

Stepping into the exhibition space really feels like you’re stepping into a child’s imagination. The bright colours and the magical realism make it such a playful atmosphere in comparison to a stereotypical hospital ward. Was this at the centre for you when you began your work on this exhibition? 

First of all, when the Wellcome Collection approached and said, ‘would you like an exhibition with us’, it was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. When they showed me the space, it was long and thin and I thought, ‘this is a hospital ward’. There’s a drawing in the sketchbooks that I did literally on the day I saw that space. I drew what the exhibition would look like. I knew what it was going to be: this huge diorama that was about both the exterior and interior. The exteriors were all the medical stuff, and the interiors were all the memories and things that I thought about in hospital.   

I wanted it to be like the seaside as well. A lot of my work is about these memories of going to the seaside because it was the only time that we saw colour. It was our art galleries. We saw rides with paintings on; it’s the first time I ever saw a painting. I thought, ‘oh blimey! Someone did that!’ There must be people like me that do this job. The exhibition is full of stuff that I remember from that time. I wanted it to be like the kid’s annuals that we used to get at Christmas. 

I wanted facts on the wall, so there’s facts about my chickenpox, which developed into this thing. Then underneath that, I’d put that it was Tom Baker’s last episode or that I heard ‘Strawberry Fields’ for the first time and all these little silly things that create a kind of atmosphere. 

The Significance of 254

The title of your exhibition is ‘Jason and the adventure of 254’. Can you expand on the reasons for that title? 

I’m named after Jason, from Jason and the Argonauts, which is pretty cool. Regarding the 245, I was diagnosed 1 August 1980, between 2:45 and 3:15pm. I know that because it was visiting time at the hospital and I was watching the men’s 1500m race final at the Moscow Olympics. The race started; I think it was about 2:50pm. So I was watching it as I was being diagnosed. The shirt that Seb Coe (British athlete and subsequent winner of the race) was wearing in that very race was the number 254 and I was diagnosed at 2:54pm. 

What are the chances of me being an eleven-year-old kid lying in bed watching this race, getting diagnosed and hearing that I’m not going to make it to the age of sixteen, then forty years forward in time making art about that?

Interactive Art and Accessibility

The exhibition greatly encourages visitors to touch and engage with the exhibition. This is very different to what is stereotypically experienced in art galleries and exhibitions and made for a welcome change. How important was it to you whilst constructing the pieces that your audience should physically touch and engage with your art? 

It was important because I wanted it to be like a fun fair. I want people to have an experience. I want it to be kind of high art. But I knew children would like it and really get it, which is being proven right. I got a lovely e-mail from a parent who said, ‘my kid saw your exhibition two weeks ago and we’re here again because they wanted to come back’. That’s been really powerful. The stuff that I talk about is difficult to talk about; if you’re getting people to engage with it in a sensuous way, in terms of touching it, they start to look at the detail. 

I was in bed for more or less a year, and I couldn’t feel anything in my body other than pain. It was very difficult having this body that was really working against me. It’s an exhibition that’s about trauma, childhood trauma. And I’ve managed to make it entertaining.  

When people are touching it, they’re engaging with me as an eleven-year-old kid. I go to galleries where you see Veneer’s and Rembrandt’s and there’s a distance. Like I said, my main influence as a kid was that I didn’t see art. Instead, I saw fairground rides with paintings on, so I want to make my work about fun. That is the vehicle that I have my own narrative with. 

Scale and Symbolism

You really play with size. The imposing presence of the figure in the bed dominates the space. The calliper boots tower over you. The caricatures of infection are huge, their shadows blocking out the light at parts. The soldiers too are larger than life. The size of Seb Coe with a TV for a head is much smaller in comparison. What was the purpose behind this? 

I was trying to depict the sensory part of a time when I couldn’t feel my body anymore. Yet every now and again I would get really intense signals in my feet, so I increased the scale of the feet. I’m OK messing about with scale and it fits in with a child’s view of things as well. To me, that ward was vast and endless and scary and so I wanted it to be like the seaside as well. 

The boots were influenced by Tommy from The Who. I had to wear those calliper boots. A number of parents have come up to me and said that their kid had to wear them, and they had to paint the boots to make the kid them wear them.  

I mean, every part of me had something attached to it. I had a surgical collar that started at the back of my skull and went all the way down my back. It used to give me really bad migraines. I had a spinal corset, a big thing that strapped me into my chair, so I didn’t fall over. 

I don’t think I’m ever going to be short of ideas as an artist because of my experiences. I was wanting to take these horrible sorts of surgical stuff and make them kind of relatable and accessible. 

Yorkshire Roots and Working-Class Identity

I really enjoyed the way you weaved your working-class roots into your exhibition. I particularly loved the parts of it that read like a love letter to 1970s Yorkshire, especially your colourful depictions of your time at Withernsea on family holidays. How important is this idea of ‘home’ to you in your work? Do you see Yorkshire as its own motif in this exhibition? 

Yorkshire is a bizarre place. They like being forthright: when I got ill, a family member said, ‘well, I’m not going to bloody treat you any differently’.  

I’m one of eight with no money from a little council house and we used to go on holiday to Withernsea, which is a little dot on the east coast of England. It was always bloody freezing and we stayed in this little, we called it a chalet, but it wasn’t, it was a hut. And I thought it was magic.  

As a family, we never articulated anything. We never told each other we loved each other and we never hugged. But you know what? I never ever as a kid thought that I’m not loved. I was so loved. It’s not everybody’s experience but I was really loved, and I was very lucky. My mum, bless her, had her own struggles throughout life. When I told her that I wanted to be an artist, she said, ‘well, if you want to become an artist, we’ll save up and send you to Paris because that’s where they all are’. That was an example of the kind of support that I had.  

The day that I got diagnosed, they were very obviously affected. But my mum said, ‘we’re not going to treat you any differently. We’re going to give you all the best opportunities’. I attended a hospital special school. You’d get in and go ‘where’s Phil?’ and they’d say, ‘he died last week’. That was normal. You had to kind of deal with that quickly and get around it. I’ll tell you, the reunions are nothing to talk about. I’m the only one left. But yeah, it was a very special, fantastic childhood. 

The hospital bit was tough. There are some references in the work that are about quite dark things: I was in hospital for a year and in that period horrible things happened. I’m trying to deal with that as well. The Wellcome Collection have been amazing. They paid for counselling because they said, ‘this seems like it could be quite triggering’. They were proved correct. My sister said, ‘oh, can you remember that time we came to visit you and your head was face-down in your food?’. I couldn’t lift it up, so I’d fallen into my own food. I said ‘no, but thank you for telling me’. 

I think the exhibition has been good because it’s helped people deal with their own experiences. You’re never alone. If you make a piece of artwork that’s a film or a book or whatever, you’re not interrupting: it’s there and people can bring their own experiences to it and bathe in that empathy. And it seems to be working. 

The Power of Maternal Love

Could you tell me a little more about how important your relationship with your mother was in those early years of diagnosis? 

I secretly think that my Yorkshire working-class family was actually Italian because it was all about the Mama. Picasso talks about the Madonna, and I always saw my mum as this kind of beautiful, Madonna type. My mum was really amazing. So was my dad. My dad was really stressed, but he had eight kids and no money, so who wouldn’t be.  

We were brought up really well and we had great experiences. When mum was in her last days, I said to her, ‘thank you’. There were loads of pressure put on them for me to go into a home, which would have killed me. I said, ‘you saved my life, mum’. She said, ‘well, what do you expect me to do? You’re my lad’. 

I’ve always thought that those are such simple words, but it’s words that make governments fall and totally eclipse power. She was Irene. 

Irene and Peter, they were just ordinary people. They both were unbelievably eccentric. My dad would go out of the room and change his hairstyle and come back in and see if anybody had noticed. We laughed all the time.  

And when I was in hospital, I was eleven and my mum was fifty-two. So, she was lifting me in and out of bed in the morning and buying me paints and she was just an incredible woman. I think with working-class families there’s a myth that it’s patriarchal. It’s not, it’s about the mum, it’s about Mama. She was a character. 

Capturing Wonder Through Nostalgia

Nostalgia is peppered into the exhibition, whether that’s your own nostalgia of your youth and time at the hospital or the nostalgia of Britain. Can you tell us a little more on why you emphasise this sense of nostalgia in your pieces? 

When I was first asked about the show, the Wellcome Collection said, ‘what do you want people to think of it?’. I said, ‘I want kids, when they walk in, to go “wow”’. I want adults to remember what it felt like to be a child and to enjoy being playful again.  

The dioramas are based on these diorama machines that you used to put twopence in. These 1930s dioramas were rubbish, but I thought they were beautiful. I tracked down the ones that I saw as a kid. They’re in the Hull Streetlife Museum. I found them and I put some money in and I watched them and I was transported back. So, I wanted that sense of wonder, and I wanted people to go inside my memories.  

One of my memories in one of the dioramas was of my mum. She didn’t like swimming in front of people, so we used to go down to the beach at about ten at night. This particular year there was loads of jellyfish. The sea was lit up and there was my little mum, because she was only about five-foot, swimming. When you’re a kid, you’re bright and you feel things intuitively, but you can’t articulate it. I was experiencing this moment, almost thinking to myself, ‘oh, I’ll put this away in the filing cabinet because I think something special is happening here’. You know, we’ve all got stories to tell.  

Personal Healing Through Art

You said that the exhibition very much encapsulates that merging of past and present. Now we are in the ‘future’ of this exhibition. How has this exhibition helped you with reflecting on your time in hospital and the years that followed? 

It has really helped. I’ll be honest, it’s unlocked a lot of memories that I didn’t know I had. It’s helped my family to deal with a lot of stuff. I think it’s helped people that have been to the exhibition to understand illness, childhood illness, and kids get it because it’s funny. There’s a lot of colour there, there’s a lot of humour. 

But you can still be sophisticated and tell stories. I always try and equate it to the film Jaws. The only person who could make Jaws so amazing is Steven Spielberg. If it had been directed by a lesser director, it wouldn’t be the same film. It’d just be like a gorefest. To tell a story, you must have the tools and the ability to be authentic and be real, because people do get it. 

An actress contacted me who knew the director of Inseminoid (a film referenced in one of the dioramas). She said that he was such a nice man and that he’d have approved. She found it very touching.

Art as a Transformative Force

How would you say that art has changed your life? 

From being a working-class kid with no discernible options, it gave me options. It introduced me to education and books.  

It’s taken me a long time because even when I graduated from a fine art degree, I still wasn’t convinced that I was good enough. I became a teacher and then I went into management. It wasn’t until my 30s that I thought I could do this. I call it being fully baked. You’ve been in the oven and now you’re ready to go. Doing a fine art degree was like cultural national service. It introduced me to ideas about politics. I remember going to see The Last Temptation of Christ and all these protesters outside were saying ‘God loves you’ because it was controversial, but we were encouraged, because of the way the art education was then, to look at stuff that was difficult. Instead of going through that door, I went through that door and it gave me that choice; I can choose to do this because I’ve got this education now. 

I’m moving my hands now. It is amazing to be able to do that. Of course, because of the damage done to me whilst being paralysed, I’m now in constant pain. In the middle of this interview, I took some pain medication. It’s making talking a little bit more difficult, but it’s to keep the pain levels down. But there’s so many stories to tell: I see almost a trilogy of future exhibitions ahead because I went from basically being completely paralysed to going to university. I’m also coming to terms with the fact that, oh, I’m not dead.  

I’m alive. 

Editor: Megan Hayes.
© Jason Wilsher-Mills and Pain Concern, 5 December 2024.
All rights reserved.

Beth Evans is arts editor with Pain Concern.

More details can be found on the Wellcome Collection’s website, including images of the exhibition’s highlights and a five-minute video tour narrated by Jason.

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