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Around Town Meets...
Graham Ibbeson
By Brian Elliott
 I don’t want to show off but not long ago I was in Florence, looking at some of the great figurative sculptures of the Renaissance. It was a marvellous experience but, do you know, I did not get the same emotive reaction as I did when viewing the work of a Barnsley lad.
No, I’m not really comparing Ibbeson to Michaelangelo (I can hear Graham laughing in the background) but his creations mean more to me. They make me laugh. They make me think and I must admit several of his mining commissions make me cry.
Isn’t that what good art is all about? Graham’s devotion to ‘capturing the spirit of the people’ appears in all his sculptures which is why they communicate so well with ordinary folk. Although his work is in private collections and many public museums many serve as highly accessible pieces of public art, sited in public places for all to enjoy.
Graham Ibbeson has been a professional sculpture for over 25 years. He has developed an international reputation, exhibiting throughout Europe and the USA. But his home and workshop remains in Cockerham Lane, Barnsley.
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 It was lovely to interview him there, sat in his back garden, in the middle of a summer heatwave, a cup of tea immediately provided by Carol, his wife of 38 years.
One of Graham’s most famous recent commission is ‘Eric Morcambe’, a superb bronze slightly larger than life-size sculpture unveiled in Morcambe by the Queen in 1999. Eric in Sunshine Dance pose of course, wearing plus fours (as a gag) and binoculars around his neck (Eric’s RSPB connection) was the winning entry (most commissions being highly competitive). Typically, it was a long selection and fund raising process, spanning six years. The making of the statue coincided with Carol undergoing surgery, so it was a difficult time but when Eric’s widow, Joan, on seeing the work in Graham’s studio said ‘That’s him.
Get the kettle on Graham’, everything seemed worthwhile. Graham was the first to greet the Queen at the unveiling ceremony and she laughed when she saw the figure.
I first came across Graham’s work when visiting the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the grounds of Bretton Hall College in the early 1980s. Several sculptures were arranged as part of a garden trail and their impact was such that shrieks of laughter could be heard coming from the bushes. Graham uses humour as a tool to to lead people into his work, helping them to look into the world in a different and thought provoking way. Perhaps this was epitomised in an earlier work sited there - the Lost Monument - where four scouts appear somewhat bewildered under perplexingly-placed signs and puns including a Wild West arrow.
The road to becoming a full-time sculptor has not been easy. A child of the Fifties, Graham Ibbeson was brought up in the mining village of Shafton where the ‘grey landscape’ or muckstack was his playground. There is no doubt that living in such a community and coming from a mining background has had a big influence on his work. His coalmining father, Kenneth Granville Ibbeson worked at the nearby Monckton colliery complex and later at Ferrymoor/Riddings Drift.
Both of Graham’s grandfathers had mining connections, his maternal forbear moving to Shafton from Durham, probably during the Hungry Thirties.
In his final year at Cudworth Secondary Modern Graham was presented with an arts prize, the pleasant and surprise news reaching him during an interview with the visiting careers officer who could only suggest ‘farmwork’ since his parents were not happy about him working down the pit. Employment came in the form of an apprenticeship electrician at the NCB Shafton workshops. Sculpture played no part in Graham’s school experience.
All he could remember was visiting Clifton Museum in Rotherham and seeing a moth-eaten stuffed tiger and noticing the war memorial of the unknown soldier outside Barnsley Town Hall. His early artistic potential was recognised by a local former art teacher, Mrs Taff who suggested that he should attend Barnsley School of Art. Graham duly went for an interview with the principal, Harry Glover, thinking it was for enrolment on an evening class. Instead he was accepted as a full-time student of fine art.
 This had great appeal, after all rock stars went to art college, so the apprenticeship was aborted. Graham admitted to having an enjoyable but unproductive time in his first year. Then, when working at a Mablethorpe cafe in the summer holidays, he met his future wife, Carol who came from Ripley, Derbyshire. Courting from Barnsley would not have been easy so he abandoned college in favour of labouring jobs in Derbyshire. Marriage soon followed, and a couple of years cutting up scrap metal in a factory; and boiled sweet making at Thornton’s, smelling of peppermint for years afterwards. With a baby and a mortgage it was time for Graham to really decide what he was good at in order to progress in a career. A portfolio of work plus a couple of O-levels resulted in acceptance at his local art school, at Chesterfield, in 1971.
A year later saw Graham enrolled on a sculpture course at Leicester Polytechnic, even before his examination results had come through, accepted on his ability and his work. It was at Leicester where a Polish tutor demonstrated the importance of form, rhythm and movement, in Graham’s words the experience ‘opened up my eyes’. A year later Graham was successful in applying for a degree course at another Polytechnic, Nottingham, just a short bus ride from his Ripley home. He was able to skip the Foundation phase, graduating in 1975 with a BA 1st Class Honours, doing figurative work when conceptual art was in vogue.
Postgraduate work at the Royal College of Art in London, followed, Graham and his young family living in a basement flat in Kensington. Work in ceramics was not a preferred choice, conceptual sculpture undermining figurative interests. However, an impromptu visit to the sculpture school and a chat with it’s occupant, Professor Bernard Meadows proved to be a turning point. Graham told Bernard that he wanted to make a full-size version of a bus with 40 people on board. The Prof offered him space for a 2-week project thinking that he had said ‘bust’! Graham scaled down his ‘bus’ to a motorbike and side car. The two weeks became two months and, working from seven in the morning until throwing out time he had created a tableau street scene. Professor Meadows accepted the biggest of hints and Graham was transferred to the Sculpture School, having a lovely time, graduating with an MA in 1978. Two London galleries had started to stock his work but Graham decided to move back to Barnsley to began the uncertainties of life as a self-employed artist, supplemented by a couple of days teaching.
Graham Ibbeson’s early commissions included the Reluctant Coal Queen, following on from a similar piece about the closure of the Sheffield steel industry. A proposal for a 40 ft figure to be placed on the top of Dodworth muckstack, visible from the M1 did not materialise but what a pioneering landmark it would have been, a decade and a half before Gormley’s Angel of the North. Graham’s mining memorial at Conisbrough consisting of two separate bronze figures amid limestone boulders is well worth seeing. Out of fallen debris a dying miner fatally struggles, his left arm clutching a pick. Nearby is a grieving widow, hands on hips, wearing a shawl over her head and shoulders, staring towards the former Cadeby pit. This moving composition, unveiled in 1987, is dedicated to the men and boys who lost their lives at the Denaby and Cadeby collieries - and to the women ‘who shared their lives and suffered their loss’. On the lawn outside the NUM headquarters in Barnsley is another notable bronze composition, unveiled by Arthur Scargill in 1993. The miner (c.1985) is wearing a helmet, singlet, and trousers with knee-pads and boots. His barefoot ‘wife’ (representing a 19th-century widow or mother) stands to his right, wearing a shawl and holding a baby. His pony-tailed daughter (a child of the Fifties) stands to his left in skirt and sandals. They stand on ground covered with lumps of coal, the whole mounted on a granite base. Another sensitive and thoughtful tribute, this time in memory of ‘those who have lost their lives in supporting their union in times of struggle’. Also in Barnsley, in the entrance to the Barnsley Building Society, is an impressive wall relief showing a small group of people walking from Barnsley’s old industrial past to the future. They range in age from a veteran glassblower to a small girl holding a teddy bear. A miner holding a pick is the central figure. This piece shows how Barnsley is moving forward as a town. The Barnsley Building Society also commissioned a small panel at their Cudworth branch. Here, Graham used his childhood memories of the local area in a stylised form, encompassing many of the human and physical elements of the former mining community. Recently (2005) the company’s Wakefield branch celebrated another Ibbeson completed commission:
The Family of Man, a piece influenced by the work of Barbara Hepworth.
The tallest free-standing sculpture in Nottinghamshire was unveiled at Hucknall in 2005. A twice life-size modern miner stands, looking gladitorial, on a 12 foot miner’s lamp. Within the structure is a working life-size figure of an old miner, stripped to the waist and wearing a flat cap, filling coal. Around the upper part of the lamp is a frieze in tribute to the local community. Hucknall was the home of Byron but local people recognised the ‘aristocracy’ of the miner going to work down the pit. At the unveiling former Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire miners embraced. It was another moving ceremony.
Perhaps the monument that Graham Ibbeson was ‘born to make’ can now be seen at South Kirkby. Wielding a pick, a muscular miner, almost in pain, stripped to the waist, kneels on top of a granite plinth. It is a most impressive work and one that means so much to the local community. A plaque containing a list of all miners killed can be seen at the base of this new landmark memorial.
Graham’s work has been in considerable demand in recent years. Completed commissions include The Leeds Millennium Sculpture (2001), The Spirit of Jarrow (2001), Cary Grant (for Bristol, 2001), Redcar Panels (2002), Laurel and Hardy (for Ulveston, life-size figures in bronze leaning on a lamp-post, 2005) and Benny Hill (for Southampton, currently at the foundry but soon to greet people using the Isle of Wight ferry).
Supported by the Yorkshire Bank, Clydesdale Bank and the National Bank of Australia, a joint touring exhibition - with Ashley Jackson - is scheduled for October, starting at South Kirkby and then moving to London’s West End and other venues but finishing back at South Kirkby. From Yorkshire with Love, it is from the ‘Best End to the West End’ according to Graham who sees the partnership as himself creating the spirit of the people and Ashley painting the spirit of the landscape. Both are great ambassadors for the talent of Barnsley.
Published Autumn 2006. All informaion correct at time of print.
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