In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, at 2:54pm, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were being told that he had only a few years to live.
A bout of chicken led to his immune system attacking itself. He was hospitalised and paralysed from the neck down. But the doctors were wrong: he survived.
Those years in hospital, then in recovery, stuck immobile on a ward, lost in his thoughts, awakened a deep creativity in him. Film, TV, cartoons and sport were his escape, and his path towards art. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity.
Two vast orthopaedic boots stand like totems as you walk in, but these aren’t austere miserable corrective devices, they’re psychedelically patterned, ultra-colourful - they’re Wilsher-Mills reclaiming his own history and trauma and turning it into joy.
Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening
A huge body lies on a hospital bed in the middle of the room, its feet massively swollen, its guts exposed. Toy soldiers brandishing viruses lay siege to the patient. Seb Coe, his head transformed into a TV, is the figure’s only distraction.
The walls show comic book daleks and spaceships, Wilsher-Mills reimagining his static body as futuristic vehicles or beings with wheels and jets and thrusters. Every inch of the space is covered in pop trivia, or dioramas of happy memories.
There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical terror. But it is, by design, incredibly family-friendly, filled with concessions to intelligibility, interaction and access; simple language, easy narrative flow. It’s so child-friendly it feels like it’s not meant for adults, like you’ve been caught ordering a Happy Meal, which is a shame because the work has more to offer than that. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening, unscary. Maybe that’s so kids aren’t terrified of what happened to him, but maybe it’s also his way of defanging the memories for himself, a way of converting pain and fear into fun and colour.
The ultra-positivity of all of it jars a little with how shocking the story is here. But that's the point I guess. It’s positivity as a shield, TV and sport and cartoons a defence mechanism, and one that seems to have worked pretty powerfully for Jason Wilsher-Mills.
