A 'visually spectacular' exhibition based on an artist’s life-altering experience of becoming disabled has transformed a Coventry gallery into a surreal hospital ward.

Disabled artist Jason Wilsher-Mills MBE has brought his acclaimed exhibition Jason and the Adventure of 254 – inspired by childhood memories of the hospital ward where he learned he was paralysed – to the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

The surreal and uplifting exhibition, which features illustrations depicting significant episodes in the artist’s life and draws on eclectic creative influences from comic books, television and Charles Dickens, has been commissioned by Wellcome Collection.

A community open day was recently held at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum to mark the launch of the exhibition, which will run at the city centre gallery until Sunday 5 October.

Its title refers to the exact time, 2.54pm on 1 August 1980, when 11-year-old Jason was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition which left him paralysed from the neck down until the age of 16.

At that moment, Sebastian Coe, whose vest bore the race number 254, was winning gold in the 1,500 metres at the Moscow Olympics.

The surreal coincidence is captured in one of the show’s centrepieces: a hospital-bed-bound figure watching a TV that has morphed onto Coe’s torso.

Unable to physically explore the wider world around him for five years, the artist came to inhabit an interior world filled with action heroes, TV shows, films, comics, books and his own vivid imagination.

Oversized plastic toy soldiers delivering viruses and inflatable germs hanging in the air are also among the imaginative creative choices, alongside a series of dioramas based on penny arcade machines, which act as windows into the artist’s mind, illuminating some of his childhood memories before and after his diagnosis.

More information: theherbert.org