Mark Ibson: Yorkshire artist who works in an old blacksmith's shop and is featured on Salvage Hunters

Ibson, 53, is a self-taught artist from the East Riding village of Bishop Wilton — population 600 — and has lived locally all his life. The blacksmith’s forge at its heart was owned and run by his grandfather, Herris Fisher, serving agricultural clients from the early 1900s until the late 1990s.

A few years after it closed Mark began using the Blacksmith’s Shop, as it has always been known, as a studio for his abstract painting and furniture restoration work. “But I’d always wanted it to become an art gallery,” he says.

His vision came to life last year after a chance encounter at Dean Clough in Halifax, during a selling exhibition for rediscovered Hebden Bridge artist Alan Gummerson (1928-2020), who taught at Leeds College of Art. While viewing the offbeat work — upcycled metal sculptures, ceramics, textiles, charcoal drawings — Ibson met Gummerson’s daughter Tracey Cockburn.

Her dilemma, she said, was that there was so much artwork the family had nowhere to keep it after the show. Ibson initially offered his empty forge as a storage space, but then realised the pieces could be exhibited there, turning it into the gallery he had always wanted.

He and his business partner, design expert Barry Parker, 77, bought the collection and took it in three vanloads back to Bishop Wilton.

“A lot of the work was in very poor condition,” Ibson says. “When we unloaded it, I told Barry to just drop it in a corner, but he insisted on placing it in the gallery’s front window. It looked amazing.” The Blacksmith’s Shop had found its new purpose.

Its inaugural exhibition opened a few months later, dominated by the Gummerson collection and featuring Ibson’s own large-scale abstract canvases, along with rare mid-century modern design pieces collected by Parker, and work by Lawrence Miami, a multimedia artist from the Humber region.

The show “wasn’t a commercial exercise, it was about saving the art. Barry spent weeks restoring the Gummerson assemblages. You don’t know what to expect: you do your best and hope for the best, and it surpassed what we hoped for.”

What makes the Blacksmith’s Shop unique is that it disrupts the traditional image of a village art gallery, because Ibson’s passion is Outsider Art, also known as Art Brut (“raw art”), of which Gummerson was a prolific creator.

“As a self-taught painter, initially I was interested in contemporary art, particularly Picasso,” says Ibson, who did a Foundation art course at Hull, then studied graphic design at Bolton Institute. “But really, I was looking for something more organic and I detested the established gallery system. I developed more of an affinity with Outsider Art; it was a natural evolution.

“Now is the time to readdress the conventional view of art history, and challenge what a countryside art gallery can be.”

What defines Outsider Art? Broadly, it is self-taught, visionary art that doesn’t fit within mainstream culture, from graffiti to folk art, as well as art made by people on the margins of society — in psychiatric hospitals, therapy groups, or prisons.

The term “Art Brut” was coined in 1945 by French artist Jean Dubuffet when exploring the work of untrained artists, while “Outsider Art” originated in 1972, the title of a trailblazing book by radical British art historian Roger Cardinal.

Another aficionado of Outsider Art is TV star Drew Pritchard, antique dealer and relentless rummager in country houses, warehouses, and salvage yards for his show Salvage Hunters, which boasts 250 million viewers globally. In a 2022 episode Pritchard described the genre as “massively undervalued in the U.K.”

Having heard about the Gummerson show at Bishop Wilton through a contact, Pritchard sent researchers to look at the place and, last November, arrived with his signature flat cap, sidekick Tee and a camera crew to film an episode there.

A famously shrewd buyer with a magpie eye for the unusual, the presenter left with “three of Barry’s lamps and 13 Gummerson life drawings,” Ibson reveals. “He told me it’s one of the best places he’s ever been to — but maybe he says that to everyone!”

Another high-profile follower is Matthew Higgs, Yorkshire-born Director/Chief Curator of the prestigious White Columns, New York City’s oldest alternative gallery, founded in 1970 as a non-profit experimental platform for art. Higgs, a director at White Columns since 2004, has been to the Blacksmith’s Shop twice since last summer, during transatlantic visits to see family in York.

“Outsider Art is a useful term,” Higgs says, speaking from his New York home, “because it sets up the idea of a creative force operating outside the status quo.

“What impresses me about Mark’s place is that it’s in a small village and seems to have become an extension of village life. It’s a dynamic force in a rural community that wasn’t there before, a resource for the community and for people beyond it, too. I also like that it’s turned a disused forge into a cultural hub at a time when blacksmiths’ labour is disappearing — in that sense it’s not so different from Tate Modern in London, an old industrial building that has become an art space.”

When this summer’s exhibition opens on 29 July, returning visitors will see that the gallery has doubled in size, thanks to the opening of a large central room, which enables Ibson to grow his roster of talent. The paintings, drawings, textiles, and ceramics are shown alongside mid-20th-century lights and furniture by eminent designers and brands including Arne Jacobsen, Verner Panton, Harry Bertoia, Knoll and Ercol.

Parker’s curated selection was mainly sourced in Amsterdam, “so it’s unlikely that people here will have seen any of it before,” Ibson says. This bold juxtaposition of creative styles results in a collection — and a visitor experience — like no other.

Excitement surrounds the gallery’s newly built sculpture garden, for which Ibson has curated work by Alan Gummerson, with new additions by Lawrence Miami and also John Cutting, an ex-British Army soldier in his 60s who suffers complex PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from seeing active service in Northern Ireland as a teenager.

After a second career as an engineer, he began making his powerful sculptures from scrap metal — cogs, chains, found objects that express memories of “being shot at; being bombed” in Belfast — as part of his trauma therapy, and went on to earn a Master’s degree in art from York St. John’s.

Why is self-taught art therapeutic? “It offers a direct connection to the creativity we all have as children,” says Higgs, “even if we don't follow it in later life."

“Being creative helped me when I had a few troubles of my own earlier in life,” Ibson adds, “and it's the humanity of Outsider Art that inspires me, giving a voice to people who come to art as a way of healing. It’s 100 percent positive, there is no downside.”

The Blacksmith’s Shop 2023 exhibition launch event is on Saturday 29 July from 5pm and all visitors are welcome (admission free). Open daily 10am-4pm from Sunday 30 July and throughout August. It will appear in series 18 of Salvage Hunters on Discovery/Quest, follow @mark_ibson for details.