Jason and the
Adventure of 254

Friday 11 July - Sunday 5 October 2025 | Free with Herbert Entry Admission

Jason and the Adventure of 254 is a major solo exhibition by artist Jason Wilsher-Mills showcasing his largest and most personal work to date, commissioned by the Wellcome Collection.

The exhibition is a joyful and subversive exploration of the body, drawing on the artist’s experience of becoming disabled as a child. Reimagining the gallery space as a hospital ward, Wilsher-Mills’ installation of sculptures, dioramas and illustrations challenge cultural and societal perceptions surrounding disability, medicine and the human body. Through a kaleidoscope of colours, tongue-in-cheek humour and a touch of magic realism, the exhibition is also a celebration of family, the artist’s working-class background and the opportunities he received through hospital education.

Jason and the Adventure of 254 delves into the transformative moment when Wilsher-Mills was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, which was triggered by contracting chickenpox at the age of 11. Paralysed from the neck down until the age of 16, and unable to physically explore the wider world around him, the artist came to inhabit an interior world filled with action heroes, TV shows, films, comics, books and his own vivid imagination.

The exhibition’s title refers to the exact moment - 2.54pm on 1 August 1980 at Pinderfields Hospital, Wakefield - when the artist witnessed his parents being told of his diagnosis. At the same time Sebastian Coe, wearing the number 254, was winning the gold medal in the 1,500 m race at the Moscow Olympics, which was being shown on the ward’s TV.

The exhibition features a monumental figure in a hospital bed, watching a TV that has morphed in Sebastian Coe, surrounded by oversized plastic toy soldiers delivering viruses, inflatable germs hang in the air, and a pair of large calliper boots have been reimagined as boots the artist would chose to wear.

Floor to ceiling illustrations depict significant episodes during the artist’s life and a series of dioramas based on penny arcade machines, act as windows into the artist’s mind, illuminating some of his childhood memories before and after his diagnosis.