Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground at The Whitworth

This February, The Whitworth showcases one of contemporary art’s most unruly imaginations as 2024 Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas arrives with a major solo exhibition.

Le Bas’s work has always been about building worlds. In her practice, Romany history, folklore, protest and pop culture collide within immersive environments that demand to be encountered bodily. Questions of nationhood, gender, belonging and survival aren’t presented as themes to be decoded, but as conditions to be felt, producing art that closes the distance between object and viewer.

That sensibility shapes the exhibition at The Whitworth, where new and recent works are brought together within an expansive installation. Painted fabrics, embroidery, collage, sculpture and performance come together with objects from the gallery’s own collection, creating a restless conversation across time, belief systems and cultural hierarchies.

One of the exhibition’s focal points is Un-Fair-Ground, the monumental freestanding mural created for Glastonbury Festival in 2024 and now presented in a gallery context at The Whitworth. Drawing together ancient and mythic spirits with political and pop-cultural references, it concentrates many of the motifs that energise Le Bas’s wider practice.

The exhibition unfolds across distinct but interlinked sections, including a newly commissioned witch house installation that deepens Le Bas’s long-standing engagement with magic, folklore and witchcraft. This installation also opens outwards, bringing in works by artist peers and predecessors including Pearl Alcock, William Blake, Madge Gill, John Martin and Paula Rego – a lineage of outsiders, visionaries and rule-breakers. This approach reflects ideas of the “metabolic museum”, where collections remain active, porous and in flux rather than fixed in place.

At the centre of the exhibition sits a dedicated performance space, programmed with live events and creative activities that facilitate new forms of engagement with Le Bas’s work. Le Bas has also invited two artists from Manchester-based arts organisation Venture Arts – Sarah Lee and Leslie Thompson – to collaborate on new work, further rooting the exhibition in collective making.

What emerges is a practice that isn’t fixed on the wall – it’s lived, enacted and continually remade.