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Podcast: The Essay
Episode: The Genius of Disability: Bryan Pearce - What Would I Do If I Didn't Paint?
Description: Tom Shakespeare challenges stereotypical ideas about creativity and disability, by celebrating five disabled artists, discussing how their impairments fuelled their genius and demonstrating the variety and achievement of disabled lives.Bryan Pearce, a painter from St Ives in Cornwall, was one of the very few people with learning disability who has achieved fame in their own right. He was born with the metabolic disorder Phenylketonuria. Today, all children are tested at birth for PKU, and if they have the genetic mutation, are placed on a special diet, and so grow up unaffected. In 1929, the condition was unknown...