“The art I create is a celebration of life,” says Jason Wiltshire Mills, who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease at a young age that eventually left him paralyzed from the neck down. “It’s not sentimental, it’s humorous.”
The British artist is part of a growing number of creatives who identify as disabled and choose to make work that centers around that experience. Historically, disability has been seen as something that society must overcome, but several recent exhibitions have shown that artists are working in lockstep with the fight for disability rights, making visible experiences that have long been misunderstood and marginalized.
Wilshire-Mills is currently exhibiting work in the exhibition Crip Arte Spazio at CREA on the island of Giudecca in Venice, which charts the history of the disability art movement. He also has a solo exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London until January 12, 2025. In this exhibition, he creates a vivid and immersive ode to life in a hospital bed, as seen through the eyes of a child who takes the form of a kaleidoscopic, kitschy, life-sized statue. Various timelines blend together along the walls, revealing, for example, which song was number one on the day he had his spinal tap. This underlines that while Wilshire-Mills’ life has changed forever, the world around him has not changed.
Installation view of Jason Wiltshire Mills’s “Jason and the 254 Adventure,” which will be on display at the Wellcome Collection in 2024. Photo: Benjamin Gilbert.
Looking back, Wilshire-Mills considers his diagnosis to have been, in some ways, liberating.
“In 1980, the highest hope for a working-class kid from a poor family was to work in a factory,” he said. “When I became disabled, that’s when my creativity was born. I lived in my head. I couldn’t move, so all I could do was draw. That year I forged the artist I would become.”
But for some artists, the decision to put the experience of disability at the heart of their work is a delicate one. “I didn’t want my work to be seen solely through the lens of disability,” says Jo Longhurst, who previously used art as “an escape from the day-to-day challenges of chronic illness.” Her frequent encounters with bindweed during walks around her London neighbourhood during lockdown led her to start the long-term project Clip.
“It’s a notorious weed, but it’s also a native plant and supports an ecosystem of insects and birds,” she explained, and its ability to thrive in adverse conditions seemed like a fitting metaphor for her situation.
Clip’s first video work, “Here, Now,” premiered at Studio Voltaire last summer: a collage of photographs of bindweed and female patients in a 19th-century psychiatric hospital is interspersed with portraits of members of a contemporary artist collective who live by “Crip Time,” the theory that disabled people experience time differently and therefore require specific accommodations.
Installation view of Joe Longhurst’s Here, Now, at Studio Voltaire, 2023. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Longhurst’s decision to feature other artists helped her shift the focus away from herself and offer a more universal perspective on life with an invisible illness.
“The trap is that you end up with a kind of disability ghetto, where the only people who come to see the work are those who have a direct interest in it,” she says. “Everyone feels ignored at some point in their life and wants to be more understood.”
Yet many able-bodied people live outside the medical system, and tend to see healing as a linear process. Disabled artists have shone a light on a less-than-sanitary, convenient reality. French artist Benoit Pierron was treated for leukemia as a child, and more recently for cancer as an adult. For his exhibition, “Slumber Party,” at London’s Chisenhale Gallery last fall, he sewed together sheets into a colorful canopy, but still retained the body grime of his previous life on his hospital bed.
“I decided to build on what had threatened to destroy me,” Pierron said of his long stint in hospital as a child. “My work is so tender that it allows me to face difficult things with courage.”
Canadian artist Sharona Franklin’s playful, surreal assemblages, embalmed in gelatin, are immediately eye-catching, but they’re also packed with ephemera that document how her personal experience living with a rare degenerative disease exists within global systems. The multidisciplinary artist, writer, and disability rights advocate is perhaps best known for her plant jelly sculptures, which she shares on Instagram as @paid.technologies, but her work has recently been featured at Art Basel 2023 and in several museum shows.
The patch in her recent floor piece Utricle Quilt – Membrane Comforter (2023), featured in the exhibition Interdependence: Perspectives on Care and Resilience at the Migros Museum in Zurich earlier this year, contains organic materials such as kidney beans, harvested animal bones and oat stalk herbs, as well as IV and catheter tubing, expired medicines and parts of a medical knee brace.
“The patches speak to the environmental variability of bioethics and the intercontinental movement of humans, animals and objects that speak to geopolitical ethics,” Franklin says. “Symbiosis is important in my work, so I often use biomaterials, plants and recycled objects to reflect the interconnections between environmental harm, health capitalism, epigenetics and access to healthcare.”
Franklin originally wanted to study science, but struggled to understand the education system, so he began making art as a hobby.
“I joke that I became an artist simply because I was excluded; I couldn’t find my way into any other profession,” she said. “I still love researching and absorbing scientific information every day because it helps me understand the material and educational aspects of my practice.”
Yet many artistic activities are physically demanding and therefore carry health risks that are usually overlooked. To make a living from their art, most artists must strictly guard the hours they put in. Artists with disabilities are increasingly speaking out about the practical challenges of changing how and when they work.
Loribel Spirovski developed a severe repetitive strain injury in her dominant hand as a result of painting for up to eight hours a day. Since then, she has changed her approach, reducing the size of her canvases to make her works more manageable and lowering her prices. Many of her recent works are abstract, austere portraits drawn primarily with a few gestural lines, partially embellished with more realistic detail.
“I just didn’t have the capacity to do anything more difficult,” she said.
Spirovski considers herself lucky to have been hired by a gallery in her hometown of Sydney just before her injury, which took the pressure off of being an emerging artist: “My brain and my body were holding on until a certain point, and then it all just kind of fell apart,” she says.
While studying at the Royal College of Arts, Longhurst found it difficult to work in a studio and sometimes had to work in his bedroom.
“Those constraints have led to a completely different kind of work,” she says, adding that although she sometimes feels very frustrated with the pace of her work and her ability to engage in focused activities for only short periods of time, she breaks projects down into manageable pieces that allow her to stop and pick them up again. She chooses not to spend her limited energy going to openings and networking with galleries.
Loribel Spirovski, Homme 308 (2023). Image courtesy of HOFA, London.
Franklin usually uses a power wheelchair but switches to a walker on her “good days.”
“We live with a huge, invisible expense that we call the ‘disability tax,'” she said, citing a US study that found that disabled people must work 28% more to achieve the same standard of living as able-bodied people. She cited housing instability and the need for care as daily considerations that “take up a lot of my finances and practical time,” as well as having to use limited space in her home as a studio.
“In order to create art, I would have to take several weeks out of the year to attend medical appointments,” she added. “My physical abilities were severely limited by debilitating pain and fatigue.”
“I do things that make me feel good,” Pierron said. “I listen to drone music and I sew. I don’t do pottery anymore, I don’t do anything heroic or hardcore. I just slide out of bed and go to the sewing machine.”
The social model of disability, which has become increasingly central to the ongoing struggle for disability rights, argues that these barriers should not be seen as an inevitable part of living with a disability, but rather understood as solvable problems inherent to able-bodied society.
“[Being an artist] “It’s the only job I have,” Wilshire-Mills says, “but it’s hard.” He points out that limited infrastructure outside of professional organizations like Shape Arts and Unlimited meant he had to support his work by running workshops for more than a decade before this extra work became too exhausting. “We need better supports for people with disabilities who want to learn how to be professional artists.”
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