>>Voice Over – 1995 Disability Descrimination Act by Jason Wilsher-Mills
Jason Wilsher-Mills – Well there’s lots of inspiration because I lived it. The best
way I can sort of demonstrate what life was like before the act was one of the images
I’ve used in the actual banner. I was very ill, and I was in a wheelchair and I was released from
hospital on a weekend, every weekend usually to get back, because I was in hospital for over a year.
My brother said “oh, I’ll take you to go and see Jaws” because like every you know 12 year old
boy I was obsessed with sharks and goriness. So my brother, bless him, took me to book
the tickets, take me to the cinema, and we got there and the manager pointed one finger
at me and said “he can’t come in, he’s a fire hazard!” This is the early 80’s,
actually it was the international year of the disabled ironically, and I wasn’t allowed
to go into a public building. That’s when I realised that actually being disabled meant
that I was different. Things have moved on and I’ve tried to talk about the positive
aspects of the law change, in that I can go on a plane, I can go in public buildings,
I’m sat in Parliament today you know which is more or less fully accessible to disabled
people and those changes were brought about by that act. And not just about access it
was about trying to challenge people’s beliefs, their views on what disabled people were ‘does
he take sugar?’ Classic! You know, well I’m here why don’t you ask me! It’s
about challenging all those aspects but not doing it through anger, you know an angry
voice and bitterness, it’s doing it through experience and the positivity. The fact that
I’m a father of two children and we go on holiday, we go swimming, we do all the things
that everyone else does because of that one act. For me that’s such a wonderful thing,
attitudes take a little bit longer to change but that takes time and that will happen hopefully
through the banner and from me using humour and metaphor and all that kind of thing it
will make people think blimey, that’s what it’s like. Well I use an iPad, and I use
an iPad because it’s fully portable and because I’m disabled and sometimes my condition
means I’m laid up using an ipad means I can work anywhere. I can work flat on my back,
I can work in the chair, I can work anywhere. And it’s only 9x6 inches the screen, which
enables me to work on any scale, because they’re very high resolution images which I can scale
up to whatever size as you can see over there, the banner behind me. It’s enabled me to
work in any way that I want really, I still consider it painting, I’m a disabled artist
and I’m kind of forced to use that as a tool, but at the end of the day it’s just
a tool, it’s a tool for making art with. Artists throughout the centuries have been
predisposed to using grids, camera obscuras and I just see it part of that tradition really.
Well I wanted to do the Disability Discrimination Act, I asked to do that at the start off and
I wanted to it because I’ve lived it, I’ve lived it throughout my life and I’ve seen
changes but when I started it was really tough, it was a really tough commission because I
thought blimey what do I do? And what I want people to take away from it is those experiences,
I made a list of all the pros and cons of the disability discrimination act and hopefully
people will see that. You have to really look closely because I’ve hidden some stuff,
there’s quite a lot of hidden things in the work.