Celebrating Miss Biffin: A conversation with Alison Lapper

West country artist Sarah Biffin excelled as a professional painter by challenging the norms of Georgian society, which restricted autonomy and financial independence for disabled women. In conversation with art historians Emma Rutherford and Ellie Smith, the artist Alison Lapper will share her experience as a disabled woman artist 150 years later.

Lapper was born with phocomelia, the same condition as Biffin, who she describes as a “formidable artist and a formidable character… a strong, stubborn, singleminded human being”.