My name is Jason Wilsher-Mills. I was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 1969. I am very proud of my Yorkshire roots and heritage. I am a full time wheelchair user. Art has always played a pivotal role in my life and as a child I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. My answer was ‘to be an artist’. I became very ill as an 11 year old, which caused me to be paralysed from the neck down for 5 years. Throughout this time of complete paralysis I attended a special school and painted with a specially designed ‘mouthpiece’. I was 16 I regained my mobility, as my condition had gone into remission. In December 2011 I purchased an ipad several days after Christmas, after much soul searching and research into what would be the best way to start making art again. David Hockney had seemingly made making art on an iPad ‘legitimate’. This purchase was a pivotal moment for me, as it helped me decide in becoming a full time artist. My images reflect the issues relating to my disability, and the illness, which took my mobility away, in a way, which I hope is sometimes humorous and most importantly what I call ‘good art’. Making art on an ipad has given me a great deal of freedom and enabled me to once again produce complex images, anywhere and at anytime. These paintings are then printed using the Giclée printing method, and can be printed up to a very large scale. Using an iPad means that the surface is negotiable on which I make my art, but the integrity of the image is not. It also affords me the opportunity to work anywhere, using the small 9 x 7 inch screen to create digital paintings, which as I have said can be printed to very large sizes. Through using the iPad to paint with I have been fortunate to show my work around the world, including the UK House of Parliament, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar and galleries in Europe and America. My work has been gifted to the nation, which the 2 commissions I created for Parliament being given to museums and galleries. More Info
My creative work
Hit the North (& Other folk songs): which depicts my earliest memories of growing up in Gawthopre, near Wakefield, West Yorkshire. It was a small village on the edge of much bigger cities, but regardless of this is had its own sense of community and was indeed a very pagan place, with a yearly maypole dance and the coal race. I have included aspects of popular culture and things that were important to me as a 10 year old boy. This was the period in which I first became disabled, so the period leading up to me being ill, is almost magical, because it was a period of adventure, and I had my whole life ahead of me.
