Filling the Gaps
Portraits of Access and Activism
I once took a tube, embodying the oblivious urban student in noise-cancelling headphones. Collectively swarming towards the lift bank, people seemed to be looking around. I looked too but found no cause for curiosity. Levitating towards the Edgware Road ticket hall, I noticed people looking at me, then each other, with concern. The removal of an earbud revealed a shrill, insistent alarm emitting from my backpack.
Black and non-descript, aside from the thin wire running discreetly from it and into me, this backpack carried an intravenous infusion that I relied on to, well, live. I still do. With an ‘oops, sorry’ and apologetic smile, I fumbled to silence the pump’s tantrum (courtesy of an air bubble in the line) hoping it would become obvious to others in the busy, enclosed space that the noise came from a harmless clinical device, not an incendiary one.
That memory has always stirred social embarrassment and some guilt. I have no desire to unsettle people simply by being in a public space – but how to explain that to perfect strangers when I also have no desire to disclose private medical information? The social faux pas of an uncontainable public fart would also have been embarrassing, but at least its universal relatability (don’t kid yourself otherwise) might be conveyed with a blush and apologetic half-smile.
Yet, as I absorb disabled artist Michelle Baharier’s Filling the Gaps exhibit, my backpack blunder feels reframed. Commissioned by London Transport Museum and funded by Arts Council England, Filling the Gaps features fourteen portraits of disabled activists and Transport for London staff who have furthered access and inclusion within the UK’s public transport system. The portraits highlight historical achievements and invite reflection on ongoing obstacles. It’s thanks to these subjects that I have enjoyed the privilege of unwittingly terrorising people in a TFL lift.
Michelle calls transport accessibility the “last taboo”. She said:
“I think being able to use public transport is a human right. It’s also an environmental necessity. If we’re going to save the planet, then we do have to think about how we get everyone onto public transport. We’ve got to make it accessible in every way. I don’t think anybody’s got a magic answer because it isn’t just lifts.”
Michelle is dyslexic and finds navigating transport systems a challenge. Yet she uses words alongside icons to centre lived experience and endow her subjects with voice as well as physical presence. Michelle’s late Auntie Ettie, who was carted to a disabled children’s school via horse-drawn ambulance, is painted surrounded by her favourite advice: ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’. Baroness Jane Campbell, a disability rights campaigner and life peer, sits amidst her work and words, such as ‘Lords Accessible’ and ‘We turn our assumptions upside down.’ The legislation she fought for fittingly becomes the environment she inhabits. Grassroots protester Nick Saunders wears a t-shirt declaring ‘Piss on Pity’.
Of this slogan, Michelle told me:
“lots of people think disabled people are there to be pitted. Instead of thinking that we want quality of life, we want to be engaged, we want to enjoy what everybody else wants to enjoy. It really needs rethinking, redefining. I don’t want the subjects to be pitied. I want you to have a conversation with them.”
Paralympic swimmer Tara Flood, who was born with limb impairments caused by thalidomide, is painted mouth-open and arms gesturing mid-speech. The pity, passivity and misery that often accompany public representations of disabled people are absent. Michelle said “it’s really important to me not to allow them to be flat”, and the dimensions of her subjects are clear to see: colourful, multifaceted, dynamic. They each have interests, impact and a voice in the room – when they can access it.
One portrait that I’m naturally drawn to is that of Grant Logan, whose description lists his many achievements since acquiring a spinal injury. I’ve directly benefited from his hands-on championing of disabled media and training opportunities for disabled people. But there’s mundanity amidst the milestones. Grant said of his sitting experience:
“It was a pleasure meeting Michelle and working with her to include the elements that are important to me: vibrant art, being able to work remotely at my desk, and of course my beloved dog Harley, who sadly has passed. Michelle has captured them all beautifully in the painting.”
Grant’s sitting experience reflects Michelle’s desire for viewers to see her subjects as “just like everybody else”: “People who’ve got ambitions and dreams” but also daily lives, pets and quirks. The synthesis of extraordinary achievement with ordinary life points to a fundamental truth: that activism isn’t an occasional feature in the lives of these subjects, or disabled people at large. It’s inextricably woven into everyday life. For Michelle, the project
“started very much on realising that all my friends, and me, we all have to be activists to survive. It’s something I don’t think people realise – that most disabled people have to be quite hard-hitting activists to get on.”
A prime example might be the too-frequent experience of disabled passengers trying to “get on” buses when other passengers occupy the designated priority area. It’s a space anyone with buggies, shopping trolleys and luggage may benefit from, but its primary function is accessibility. Under the Equality Act of 2010, wheelchair users have a priority right to this area as the only place onboard where they can safely travel.
Buggies already occupying it should be folded away to enable a wheelchair to board and drivers should request that this priority is enforced. Yet rather than simply enjoying this right, disabled passengers and their carers often have to advocate for it in the face of complaints from other passengers and apathy from drivers. Michelle said: “We contribute to society and society, because of its negative perceptions, isn’t engaging with that.”
Society may tell itself that access is a physical problem, shrug off our cities as too old, pokey and uneven. But it’s human attitude and error that undermines the access accommodations supposedly in place. It’s the time I couldn’t reach the ramp-request button because a bus pulled in too far from the curb to reach it. When my companion boarded to ask the driver to lower the ramp, he refused and started driving off with her on board, me on the pavement. It’s the time Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, another of Michelle’s subjects, had to crawl off a train whilst travelling to the Paris 2024 Paralympics because the station staff at St Pancras didn’t arrive to help her disembark.
Michelle’s belief is that a blind spot on the part of non-disabled people is fostered from childhood. Most of her subjects were segregated from their non-disabled peers during school education, and Michelle herself was sent to special needs classes within a mainstream school setting. She reflected:
“I was included, but at the same time, bullied. I wanted to bring some of that out into the work because I think that’s why there are so many barriers: because people don’t know that many disabled people and haven’t grown up with them.”
This too, resonates with me. Following a lengthy hospital stay as a young teenager my grammar school, newly an academy, declared me a health-and-safety hazard. I was not permitted on school grounds because I would, they said, invalidate their insurance. And so, for over three years, I was home-tutored through the state’s hospital school service. I had to drop any subjects beyond the core syllabus and my two tutors (one for English, another for maths and science) were obliged to teach to foundation level only. Beyond that? ‘Here’s a textbook’. My essential exams were sat at the kitchen table.
That pared-back mediocrity is what so many people, amidst proposed cuts and demonisation, seem to think disabled people should accept so as not to inconvenience others. Contrarily, many insist disabled people be more independent, do more work. But how to do that when even a simple journey presents so many obstacles? How are disabled people expected to get to school or the office when folding a pram or providing a ramp, a little understanding, proves too much to ask?
Filling the Gaps challenges misconceptions. Here we are vibrant and real, our value foregrounded and framed. Progress happens when society opens the door – or else it’s knocked off its hinges. “Obviously there needs to be a lot more work” Michelle says: “We need to be in the National Portrait Gallery. We need to be where mainstream people are, not on the fringes. It’s about giving us all voice.”
Now when I take public transport, I’ll mind the demographic gaps as well as the physical ones. I’ll also skip the headphones and read a book.
Filling the Gaps exhibits at Marylebone Parish Church until 26th March, before entering the London Transport Museum collection later in 2026.