When I meet Jason Wilsher-Mills at the Grundy, he greets me with a line that sets the tone for everything that follows: “Welcome to the inside of my head.”

Walking into the gallery, it becomes clear what he means. The rooms are vivid, strange, playful and political — a world of memories, jokes, tenderness and working-class imagination built into bright, bustling pieces. But what strikes me first is Wilsher-Mills himself. He has a calm steadiness, a gentle voice with purpose behind it. Kindness appears almost immediately in our conversation, and he speaks about it with real urgency. The world, he says, constantly pushes us to compete, to look after ourselves first, to dismiss or even despise other people.

“Kindness is how you resist all that,” says. “Kindness is strength.” It is the first thing he passes on to artists and students, not as a soft sentiment but as the ground on which you stand.

Northern lights

We are in Blackpool for the opening of Jason and the Adventure of the 254, a Wellcome Collection exhibition showcasing the artist’s largest and most personal work to date. For Wilsher-Mills, Blackpool is a place where art lives in public, where people encounter it without gatekeepers.

“Blackpool is perfect, it’s an open-air art gallery for the working class. It takes art and it democratises it. People come and they don’t realise they’re looking at great art, and they are.”

He talks about being eight-years-old in 1977, travelling to the illuminations, watching light skim across the coach window and feeling something shift inside him. “I’m still in that coach,” he reflects. “Fifty years later, I’m designing some of those lights.” He smiles, imagining that moment looping back. “Hopefully some kid is in a car now with their mum and dad, feeling that spark and thinking, maybe that’s something I can do.”

Although he never mentions it himself, Wilsher-Mills’ work has been shown and celebrated internationally, and in 2025 he was awarded an MBE for services to art and disability. But none of that touches his way of speaking. He returns always to community, to people, to the work itself.

Amid stories of miners’ strikes, coach trips to the seaside, large families, rugby league, and dismissive teachers, Wilsher-Mills’ story feels familiar. A warm revealing of humour and the warmth of his working-class childhood. A landscape many of us know. And then the ground shifts. He tells me about the moment in 1980 when everything changed.

The clock read 2:54pm. On the television, Seb Coe crossed the line in Moscow, winning Olympic gold in a vest marked 254. At that exact moment, 11-year-old Wilsher-Mills was given a prognosis that tore the world away from under him. Paralysis. Uncertainty. A life doctors said would not extend beyond 16.

The coincidence is startling — national triumph set against the collapse of a child’s life. From then on, imagination was not pastime. It was the place where he lived. The roots of this exhibition were sown there too: Jason and the Adventure of the 254. In the title itself is the magnetism of trauma and fear that is already infused with a wild imagination and imagination as survival.

This is where his art gathers its force. It treats class and disability not as tragedy, but as material — energy, defiance, generosity. His work never says ‘everything is terrible’. It says ‘we can do this’. It makes space. It invites. It holds joy up to the light.

“After 16, I went to art college, drank too much, did everything I’d missed,” he remembers, half laughing. “I hadn’t even had puberty. I had no body for years.”

A working-class identity

The trauma sits inside the work, but never on its own. “Doing this unlocks a lot of stuff. Not just for me, for my family.”

Wilsher-Mills’ sister reminded him of a hospital visit during that time, and finding his face collapsed into a plate of food, something he had completely blocked out. The exhibition carries these blank spaces too, hidden-in-plain-sight details that speak to people who recognise the vocabulary of surviving your own life.

Meanwhile, we talk about the dioramas, a miniature arcade of small, bright scenes that people instinctively lean toward. “They’re little vignettes from my life,” he explains. Not nostalgia, but the moments that build a working-class childhood. “William Blake saw angels at the bottom of his garden, I saw this stuff.”

He continues: “The gods and myths have had plenty of representation. Artists have spent centuries on them. I want to make art about Ken on the council estate, the people I grew up with…I want to do what the kitchen sink lot did in the 60s and make it relevant. Explore what it actually means to be working class. There’s so much nonsense about us all being right-wing. That’s bollocks, when did that happen? I want to show the great things, the love that made us.”

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a refusal to let far-right distortions define the communities he grew up in. His work argues for a different truth: working-class life built on solidarity, humour, care and creativity.

Across the gallery, the work moves between the surreal and the stark. The Beano meets I, Daniel Blake. Zany colour sits beside medical trauma. Wilsher-Mills occupies the place where the daft and the devastating meet. Both necessary. Both honest. Outside the gallery, the first thing I see is Blackpool Rock, the large dancing sculpture created for this show. It fits Blackpool perfectly – bold, joyful, unruly. It could slip straight into the illuminations that line promenade just up the street form the gallery. When I mention this to Wilsher-Mills, he smiles and points out the details.

Looking closer, small screens sit across the figure’s surface like patches. Each shows the art of people who created work with him: disabled artists, local families, residents, workshop groups who danced, drew, moved and explored their ideas of Blackpool with him. Their gestures became the sculpture’s rhythm. Their creativity is built into its body. This is how Wilsher-Mills works. The big, spectacular forms are only the surface. Look again and you see the deeper layers, the other stories, the hidden-in-plain-sight details. The politics of kindness runs through it all — not only in what we see, but in how the work was made and who was invited in. These are not spectators, they are co-creators.

“In galleries, disabled artists are usually audience, if they’re there at all. Here, they’re part of the work.”

The political edge sharpens when he talks about the cost of existing as a disabled artist. “I have to earn a third more than my able-bodied counterpart just to survive.” Travel means hotels, accessible facilities, support workers, planning. “I have to be in the public eye to survive as an artist, and to survive as a person.”

Curator Paulette Brien tells me later that previous versions of this exhibition were shown in one vast room, but at the Grundy the work moves across several spaces. The body becomes fragmented, encountered piece by piece. Soldiers patrol the bed. Giant viruses hover. Childhood, illness and fear are laid out in sections. Yet the imagination, wild, rich and stubbornly joyful, remains fully alive. It works, and sat here talking to the artist, with the wild, colourful work all around, his mischievous smile and gentle presence provide an uncanny sense of us sat amid the unspooling of his imagination into giant-sized reality.

Before I leave, I mention taking a trip down the lights before leaving Blackpool. Wilsher-Mills returns once more to that coach window in 1977, the child seeing something dazzling and feeling a world open up. He holds that moment with care, as if passing it forward, “still magical, every time”. A reminder that great art does not simply impress, it invites.

By Peter Shukie

Main image: Jason Wilsher-Mills at the Grundy. Credit Martin Bostock Photography.

 

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