THE pavements of Salisbury is being transformed into a canvas today as part of an exhibition focusing on wheelchair users.

Artist Sue Austin is using a specially-adapted paint wheelchair to create a trail from Blue Boar Row to Salisbury Arts Centre as part of the People Like You exhibition.

Ms Austin, who has used a wheelchair since 1996, aims to challenge negative perceptions people have about wheelchair users.

She said: “When I started using a wheelchair I found people’s reaction to me completely changed.

“When I asked people the first words that came to mind when I said ‘wheelchair’ they said things like ‘limitation’, ‘restriction’, ‘fear’ and ‘illness’.

“But for me I’d been pretty much housebound and the wheelchair gave me an amazing sense of freedom. I want people to see it as an empowering object rather than a limiting object.”

Ms Austin started a degree in fine arts at Plymouth University in 2003 and began exploring making work that expressed her wheels as her freedom.

She is now doing a master’s degree and has used her wheelchair for a number of projects including a digital project attaching cameras to the chair and painting the wheels to create patterns on canvases, and has even developed an underwater wheelchair.

For the People Like You project, which has permission from the relevant local authorities, she is using a water-based, chalky paint, like the kind used to mark fields of play on a sports pitch, which will wash away after several weeks.

“The idea for this came when I went through some puddles and looked behind afterwards and thought ‘those trails look really interesting’ and they created a maze.

“The point is to create a thinking space. Many people in wheelchairs have this feeling of being invisible, partly because people physically look over you but partly because of the preconceptions people have.

“It’s working on various levels of presence and absence.

“People can trace my wheels through the city when I am physically absent but I become conceptually present as people play and dance along the lines.”

People Like You runs at Salisbury Arts Centre until Sunday, and will also include the work of two other artists who use wheelchairs.