“When I’m making art, I feel it in my stomach” says Jason Wilsher-Mills, an artist who uses iPads & Wacom tablets to create art, often relating to his memoryies and his struggles with illness and disability. More recently he’s also been creating large interactive sculptures!
Jason begins explaining how his understanding of success has changed overtime, “because it’s feast and famine the way that I work, I can do something really amazing for six months and then there’ll be nothing for the next six months. I’m always looking over the shoulder a bit and I think that’s the working class side of me. We’re always kind of concerned about paying the mortgage and all that so, success for me is that really.”
“When I was in hospital, part of the Wellcome Collection thing is me hearing Strawberry Fields Forever for the first time,” he recalls past experiences and how they relate to his thoughts on legacy, “I thought Christ, there’s somebody out there that is creative like me. I hope that I can have a similar thing whereby my kids are proud of me and think he’s a bit weird but, he’s doing an interesting job and he’s got work there.” Jason continues discussing how he wants his work to impact others, “It’s that weird kid from a council estate that sees my work as something that kind of triggers a process. Hopefully, there’s little geezer somewhere who sees my work and experiences something.”
The Wellcome Collection is a museum based around health, medicine and changing the way people view these topics. Diving into some deeper ideas, Jason depicts his health challenges growing up which inspired his exhibition at the museum. “The Welcome Collection, even though it deals with some really deep issues such as mortality, it is a PG version of what happened. To a certain extent, I was in hospital in bed for a year and it was a really difficult period. The NHS is amazing, but it was still quite a difficult place to be as a kid. I was away from my family for a long time, I was really frightened.”
The exhibition Jason created involves giant callipers. He touches on his influences relating to experience with callipers, “That was a painful experience for me” he starts. “It was really weird when we had the opening because my family came to London and they experienced it. They were there, actually there when it all happened. I was suddenly really panicking. I thought, bloody hell, what if they kind of freak out about it? And they were in a lot of the work. Fortunately, it goes down really well.” Jason’s art is something that will resonate with so many people, “I’ve had people, a mother came to me she was in tears bless her and she said, my son wore those caliper boots. She said, ‘I don’t know how you knew, but we used to have to paint stars on them to make him wear them’. I said it is because I wanted to wear Doc Martens and, be like my mates and be fashionable but we were given these really horrible caliper boots. I put myself up there to be, to kind of say the things that other people might find difficult.”
On the process of creating his work, Jason comments, “well, there’s 55 years leading up to it. When I’m making art, I feel it in my stomach. It’s overwhelming. The piece of work in the Wellcome Collection show, The Hippo Scare, it wasn’t about being scared of a hippo at the zoo. It was about how you felt about this thing that was so overwhelming.” He expands, “As a kid, I remember TV just being loads of nudity, loads of violence, nothing filtered and interior design was crazy. The only art that I ever saw as a kid was at Wythenshawe at the fairground. It all goes in and then you, you, you formalize it through art education. I mean, I, I think all my work is about childhood and childhood trauma, basically. It sounds dreadful, but it isn’t. It’s a way of dealing with it that’s both joyous and that makes people actually laugh and cry at the same time.”
Next, Jason reminisces on how things have changed for him since he started making art, “If you’d have said to me in 2011 you can do this and you can be successful. I thought all I was ever going to do was, oh, I’ll sell postcards. I’ll do the odd bit. If you’d have told me that my work had been bought for the nation, it’s in the collective, I would have said you are insane. The thing I will say is, and this is a question I get asked so many times by young artists, how do you do it Jason? Well, you do it by putting the hours in.” Adding to his advice he says “I always say to young artists stick with it, be committed to the work that you make. Success is all kind of relative anyway. I honestly, in my wildest dreams, never planned for this to happen.”
Currently Jason is creating a new piece of art, “I’m designing a new inflatable sculpture for a gallery in Scarborough, Crescent Arts. It’s going to be a giant crab and it’s going to have a hot fudge sundae on its back because Scarborough’s got this amazing ice cream Parlor. On his creative process he explains, “I thought I wonder what it looked like on top of a crab. When I drew it, I thought I like that. Then It leads you onto something else so, I’ll start drawing and I’ll draw it from every angle, above, sides, underneath, in front and behind. That process takes about a hundred hours before it goes into Photoshop and a 3D file is created. If it is an inflatable sculpture, it goes off to the company and basically, it’s like making a suit. They decide where all the seams are and where the fan goes.”
Access and finance are two problems that Jason has struggled with being a disabled artist. “I have to kind of negotiate for the support that I’m going to need to do a project, because if I travel anywhere, I have to travel with someone who makes sure that I’m okay. A disabled person spends more, I’m having to use the train a lot more because I can’t drive as much as I used to.”
He continues to express some of the limitations he’s faced, “There’s really awful things about access. Going to a gallery for an opening night, imagine the most exciting thing that ever happened to me at that point and it was in a little gallery on Cork Street and they said, we’ve got a ramp for you. I’m not lying, that ramp was unusable and I just said I’m not going to use it. I did something for a TV programme where I couldn’t even get into the green room so I had to use a loo that was half a mile down the road. It’s the problems you would not even expect in a million years to be an issue for everybody else, like, can I just go to the loo?” He giggles before homing back down on the serious situation, “this is the most common thing you get, it’s accessible Jason don’t worry about it, it’s fully accessible and you get there and it’s oh I forgot about those stairs!”
“Bloody transport, as well” he declares. “In London, I have to use taxis, there is no way I would use the underground. I had some work at the Balloon Museum and I went to the opening earlier this year, it was late at night and they sent a huge van as a taxi to pick me up. Because it was dark I couldn’t see the entrance very well so I zoom up the ramp, smack my head on it and honestly it took me a couple of days. You kind of think, no one else has to experience that other than us and we’re not only experiencing it, we’re having to pay extra to do it.”
Speaking on people wanting to do art in areas that aren’t known for their culture Jason has advice, “The Arts Council has these areas that are low arts engagement so most of Lincolnshire was in that area. They’ve just suddenly got a huge investment on the East Coast which actually goes in your favour sometimes. My advice is to get involved with those groups because together you’re stronger. Funding is difficult and it’s been a trial and error but the Arts Council are trying to make it simpler for people to apply and get funding. I say to young people, don’t let that chip on your shoulder or get in the way. Use the energy because I think northern grumpiness is a superpower.”
With no hesitation, Jason admits The Smiths have always been a big inspiration of his, “I was absolutely obsessed with them because they were the musical equivalent of stuff that I’m trying to do.” He continues, “I love the Fall and New Order and I suppose the foundation stone of everything has been The Beatles. I find Brian Wilson (Beach Boys) a lunatic but incredible. He filled his studio with sand because he wanted to bring the beach inside. I love that. William Blake I’ve only just discovered him but all the things he’s talking about like the levels of creativity and the states of mind are really fascinating.” As for other non-musical inspirations Jason mentions Charles Dickens, “I really relate to Great Expectations. In fact, it’s referred to in the Welcome Collection show, the selling graphic novels of Great Expectations because I identified with Pip.”
Some exciting projects are on the horizon for Jason, “I’m going to be doing stuff in the homeland again and there’s an announcement. By the homeland I mean Wakefield, there’s going to be an announcement in August about that. Then we’ve got the Wellcome Collection shows until January.”
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