Most artist exhibitions in galleries and museums tend to be either solo shows or group shows on a particular theme, all of them consisting of works assumed to be of a certain standard for public exhibition. This exhibition consists of 31 paintings dating from 1956 when the artist Peter Ireland was 9 until the later 1990s when he was middle-aged, plus a mass of documentary material in vitrines, all charting his very zig-zagging course as a self-taught painter.

These images and items thread together a very individual journey, whose forward movement has been generated by both unforeseen circumstances in his life and the influence on his commitment by a number of disparate people he chanced upon along the way.

There is no one template for becoming an artist. There may be some promising avenues such as attendance at an art school, but ultimately each committed artist forges his or her work through the circumstances and mentors stumbled on largely by chance, but perhaps with a determination to make sense of it all.