My work celebrates disability, my northern working-class heritage & popular culture, through cutting edge technologies and brightly coloured, largescale humorous, but challenging art. When asked what my work is about, I simply say – ‘Think ‘I, Daniel Blake’ meets ‘The Beano’.
Photo: Benjamin Gilbert CC BY-NC.
I am an artist who was born and raised in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 1969. I grew up in a large working-class family, on council estates. I fell ill with chicken pox in 1980, when I was 11 years old, with the virus attacking my central nervous system, causing me to be confined to a wheelchair.
This experience has been pivotal in my own creative practice, as my work reflects the stories relating to my disability, class, family, activism and popular culture, through large sculptures, augmented and virtual reality, along with digital painting.
I use both digital media and traditional media to create the work, which is brightly coloured and psychedelic, employing a palette inspired by the childhood comic books I read in the 1970s. I use humour to tell sometimes serious and challenging stories.
In 2020 I was awarded the Adam Reynolds Award by SHAPE Arts. I have exhibited around the world, including the 2024 Venice Biennale and at Wellcome Collection.