Contemporary art sits between two forms of repetition. One is the tired canon that keeps circling familiar movements, the other is the endless stream of algorithmic images that look perfect but feel empty. One is weighed down by inherited meaning, the other carries none at all. Both leave the viewer untouched.

Jason Wilsher-Mills stands apart from both. His work is not about prestige or technology. It is lived experience turned into colour and form. It feels like a refusal of the mechanical and the safe. It puts imagination back at the centre.

Wilsher-Mills was just 11-years-old when paralysis changed the direction of his life. The years that followed were spent in hospitals and special schools. Machines, routines and medical labour replaced adolescence. Movement became impossible. Imagination became essential. This rupture sits underneath everything in Jason and the Adventure of the 254, an exhibition at Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool. You feel it the moment you walk in. The giant figures with stretched limbs. The comic-book medical diagrams. The toys that become defenders or attackers. The bright plastic energy. None of it asks for sympathy. It is not tragic. It is transformation. Wilsher-Mills takes the machinery that shaped his early life and turns it into something alive.

The dioramas work like memory palaces. They resemble pop-up books reshaped for adulthood, holding the odd and specific humour of working-class families. Ferret kisses. Dads with hens’ legs. Seaside chaos and daftness. These are not textbook references, they are the private myths of northern towns. Childhood here is not a soft nostalgic glow. Instead, it is fogged by time and sharpened by imagination.

Wilsher-Mills’ influences come sideways rather than from art history. The Numbskulls echoed for me, that playful exploration of body and cartoon. The Beano influence reverberates, the Bash Street Kids, then Mancunian hippos drifting in murky Victorian pools at Belle Vue, Rugby League dreams. Northern viewers recognise the fragments at once. In his hands they become mythic.

Pain is present but never theatrical. The inflatable viruses float above you, purple and red, like biology textbooks made loose and wild. They turn illness into a carnival. Along one wall a timeline tells the story of his early years in the style of an annual. Bright. Absurd. Charming. Beds, machines, mouth painting and the discipline of medical routines sit beside the cultural scraps that keep him going: Strawberry Fields, Rubik’s Cubes, the small pieces of the world that take root when you are stuck in one place.

The work carries a philosophy of its own. Knowledge grows in every direction because the body cannot. Joy and pain sit side by side and imagination becomes the ground where movement is still possible.

At the centre of the gallery lies a figure in a bed lit by fairground bulbs. It looks like a medical diagram and a carnival float at the same time. Around it stand plastic soldiers, the cheap toys that filled so many bedrooms in the 1980s. Here they take the role of white blood cells that turn on him. Defence becomes attack and childhood objects become a battlefield. It is simple and direct, and it lands.

Each piece includes a QR code. Visitors can hear or read a short description and nothing is inflated. It’s just a clear and accessible path into the work where inclusion is built in rather than added later. The Union Jack appears often, but Wilsher-Mills strips it of the hostility that often now clings to the fabric. He returns it to an earlier moment, of Mod culture, music, a sense of belonging. On clothes and boots the flag becomes warm again, showing that symbols can still be used in generous ways.

Outside the Grundy, the work spreads into the town. The Blackpool Rock sculptures stand like guardians while screens show work by disabled artists and community groups. They are not extras, they are equal partners.

Further along the promenade the LOVE illuminations hang by the Imperial Hotel. They tell a life story panel by panel. Two people meet. They dance. They share years. Loss arrives. Memory remains. It is romance without glamour, the romance of the everyday. While the cameras of Strictly Come Dancing gather crowds nearby, here the light falls on ordinary lives.

The exhibition offers an alternative to two exhausted poles of gallery culture. Canonical art can drown in its own seriousness and AI images arrive rootless and forgettable. Wilsher-Mills stands between them and produces something built from colour, humour, grief, stubbornness and care. Art that comes from a life rather than a formula, art that cannot be automated.

You leave the Grundy feeling charged, not hollow. Jason and the Adventure of the 254 tells the story of a boy whose body stops moving but whose imagination refuses to shut down. Now it stands as the work of a man who knows exactly what creativity is worth.

By Peter Shukie

Main image: credit Martin Bostock Photography

 

Jason and the Adventure of the 254 is at the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool until December 20, 2025. Free entry. For more information, click here.

To read Peter Shukie’s interview with Jason Wilsher-Mills, click here.