Twenty years ago, when I was editing an art magazine, we commissioned an artist to tout his portfolio around West End galleries and report on the experience. The article appeared under the title “Nightmare on Cork Street”, only a slight exaggeration of the feelings of rejection our guinea pig suffered.

There are accepted routes into the art market and hawking your wares door to door is obviously not one of them, even for a personable young man with a fine art degree. What hope, then, for a self-taught artist with no qualifications, a troubled history and perhaps the added disadvantage of a learning disability? In a postmodern art world where the only remaining definition of art is that it is the work of a qualified artist, how does an outsider get a foot in the door?

Ten years ago Marc Steene, then head of learning at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, launched an open exhibition for artists who for various reasons, physical and psychological, felt debarred from access to the mainstream art world. Because outsiders are by definition hard to find, the first call for submissions went out through institutions – prisons, mental-health facilities and day centres – across Sussex.
The inaugural exhibition, called “Outside In”, featured 100 works by local artists. Today the show is a triennial event with a national reach and a touring programme: its latest edition, “Radical Craft: Alternative Ways of Making”, is at the Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend (until 5 November), and tours until the end of 2017.