Works of art made of scraps of thread, off-cuts of paper, and cardboard boxes salvaged from a care home’s kitchen and carefully smoothed flat have gone on display at the Wellcome Collection in London, in the first exhibition in the UK of Japanese “outsider art”.

When curator Shamita Sharmacharja visited Japan to speak to the artists who made the works she found them slightly surprised that their work was considered art. To them it was just what they do, often in almost all their waking hours.

“In Japan, the concept of outsider art does not really exist,” she said. “It is something they are learning about from European interest in it.”

Outsider art was coined as a term to describe art created beyond mainstream culture, such as in mental health institutions, although it now more generally defines work made by artists without art school training and outside the market. In the Wellcome show all the work has been made in institutions or day care centres.