At 11, the artist was struck with a condition that paralysed him from the neck down. His new exhibition recalls years of hospitals, family love, and fighting with cinema managers
In the exhibition Jason and the Adventure of 254, there’s a sculpture of runner Sebastian Coe’s body with a TV for a head. This freezes in time the moment that the artist Jason Wilsher-Mills was diagnosed with an auto-immune condition: at 2:54pm at Pinderfields hospital in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, while watching Coe win a gold medal in the 1500m race at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Wilsher-Mills would spend the next five years paralysed from the neck down due to polyneuropathy and chronic fatigue syndrome, diseases that affect mobility and attack the immune system. In the centre of the show at London’s Wellcome Collection is a vast sculpture of the artist as a child in a hospital bed, as toy soldiers move towards his body – a metaphor that doctors used to explain to him that his white blood cells were attacking, rather than defending, his own body.
Jason and the Adventure of 254 is at the Wellcome Collection, London, until 12 January
