Museums And Archives

Us & Them

We are the Freewheelers company, a group of creative disabled people in Surrey. Through Us & Them we will investigate and interpret the history of disabled people like us and share our insights through varied public outputs: a highly accessible touring exhibition reaching 31,000 people, a film, oral histories and a publication. We will use medical portraits of patients of Surrey’s mental health hospitals, 1850s-1920s, which included people with conditions like epilepsy and learning disabilities, and would have been us if we had been born in their time. We will tell their story through our voices as disabled people: developing the exhibition, documenting the project in film and recording oral histories. Central to the project are our own wet-collodion portraits, created using historic techniques and exhibited alongside the patients’ wet-collodion portraits, drawing parallels between us and them, telling their story and reframing perceptions of disabled people, then and now.