The power of photographer Simon Adams is to make you see the crystalline beauty of any given moment. A City crowd is moving in all directions, under two old-fashioned clocks in a panoramic black and white print that is radically focused so that while the background is all a blur, faces in the foreground are picked out in super-lucid detail. It’s a freeze-frame of the quotidian wonder that we take for granted – but Adams doesn’t. His pictures hold life with intense appreciation.
In 2012, Adams was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. He is paralysed from the neck down, dependent on carers who, in addition to their medical responsibilities, help set up his digital camera to shoot his big, wide-eyed images of the city and nature. An owl stares at you with hypnotic predatory intent; a purple sky broils over an aquamarine sea … these are photographs full of awe and passion, celebratory works of art that make you see afresh.
Adams happens to be my brother-in-law, but all this means is that I have some knowledge of the courage behind his impressive works. It doesn’t change my judgement of their excellence – go see for yourself. All the artists in Art Beyond Limits, an exhibition to mark the 40th anniversary of the Motor Neurone Disease Association, either have this most devastating of illnesses or have been closely affected by it. Participants range from Sarah Ezekiel, who was diagnosed in 2000 and uses eye-gaze technology to make paintings, to recently retired Daily Mail cartoonist Mac, whose wife had MND. It adds unexpected tenderness to his cartoon of astronomers looking for Brexit when you discover it contains a hidden portrait of her.
Like many people, I became aware of this illness, or group of illnesses, through the extraordinary achievements of Stephen Hawking. There is a picture of Hawking in this show with a caption that calls him “our hero”. His incredible life dramatised how MND separates mind and body in a way that poses a kind of philosophical problem. This can be a nightmare so severe that some sufferers just want to die, such as Richard Selley, who recently ended his own life at Dignitas after calling for an assisted dying bill. The artists here however, like Hawking, demonstrate the power of the human mind to go on looking and creating in the face of apparently impossible odds.
Technology is crucial to their achievements. From Miles Pilling, who takes witty street photographs from his mobility scooter, to Ron Wheeler, who is housebound but invents Turneresque fantasy landscapes in dreamy blue, red and gold, all the MND artists here use some form of adaptive technology to overcome their disabilities. It is most radically embraced by Dr Peter Scott-Morgan, a professional roboticist whose response to his MND diagnosis is straight out of science fiction: he aims to become the world’s first true cyborg. His physical functions are being replaced with synthetic ones, his organic mind integrated into an AI interface. His artwork here is a pulsing digital montage of his smiling face merging into a sea of information.
Scott-Morgan’s experiment on himself suggests motor neurone disease is both a catastrophic illness and an experience that reveals the essence of being human. Like Hawking, who travelled to the event horizons of black holes from his wheelchair, the artists here bring us news from the frontier of existence. Here is an exhibition that genuinely has something to say: we think, therefore we are.
