Art students attracted anger last week after undertaking a project that saw them paint white lines around a large chunk of Plymouth. Keith Rossiter finds out more about the special reasons behind the project.

CLOSE your eyes and picture a wheelchair user. What do you see? Possibly you'll have trouble seeing anything but the wheelchair itself, a symbol to many of awkwardness and limitation.

Almost certainly you will not picture Sue Austin. The fine art student from the University of Plymouth is on a mission to liberate people from their preconceptions.

She, along with colleague Jack Morris, was behind the mysterious white lines that appeared around Plymouth a little more than a week ago.

And they are part of the city university's free week-long fine art degree show at the Levinsky Building and Royal William Yard from Saturday.

Sue, 43, has been in a wheelchair since she developed ME in 1996.

"Almost everyone I've spoken to says that when they started using a wheelchair became invisible as a person," she says.

"It's the 'does he take sugar?' syndrome. People see the wheelchair and immediately think of the stereotypes. Partly it's because you're physically lower than most adults."

Sue's high-tech wheelchair solves that problem. At the press of a button the chair rises to bring our eyes level. She insists I try out the chair, and after a jerky start I'm soon racing around the Levinsky, hazard lights flashing.

Sue talks lovingly about her wheelchair, and the ancient converted van that allows her to drive from her home in north Devon to Plymouth.

"I can't tell you what it was like to be able to go out to the shops again," says Sue.

Before her illness, she worked in a specialist mental health team, and said she always believed in the therapeutic value of art. "When I became unwell I started using art to help me to build back out into society," Sue said.

"I felt like I became invisible. It felt like my life had slipped away. The artistic process let me start discovering and exploring myself again.

"If this work can enable people to take the journey I've taken more quickly and easily then it will have been worth it."

The white line project was a culmination of months of research, preparation and consultation with the council and shopkeepers. To those who say "any child could have done it", Sue responds: "It took me five hours to get the chair ready, and four and a half to do the painting."

She has already won awards for earlier work, putting her wheelchair in a variety of situations including floating it in a tank of water, in an attempt to explain the freedom it gives.

Always, she says, people still saw what they expected to see. The latest work, done by trickling temporary pitch-marking paint on to the large rear wheels, distills it to a simple expression of the wheelchair's movement through space.

Few could have imagined a wheelchair was capable of the smooth curves, loops and whirls that have sparked a massive debate in Plymouth.

The lines run from the Levinsky building to the art studios at Royal William Yard.

Jack's single-track trail (created with a bicycle) forms the outline of a grotesque face when drawn out on a map of the city.

Sue's lines appear to screech to a halt in the Levinsky Building, with her all- singing, all-dancing wheelchair at their end, as though the last bit of white paint has just been laid. Mounted on the wheelchair are camcorders, on playback, tracing the trail as it was laid.

There's no point arguing about whether something is art or isn't art. The only debate worth having is whether it's good or bad art.

The instant I saw Sue's display in the Levinsky building my mind was made up: good art. You may disagree.

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