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.

At The Whitworth, new and recent works are presented within an expansive installation. Painted fabrics, embroidery, collage, sculpture and performance come together in dense environments that also incorporate objects from the gallery’s own collection. The effect is a restless conversation across time, belief systems and cultural hierarchies.

Among the highlights of the exhibition is Un-Fair-Ground, the monumental freestanding mural created for Glastonbury Festival in 2024 and now presented in a gallery context at The Whitworth. The work draws together the cultural motifs that energise Le Bas’s practice, from ancient and mythic spirits to political and pop-cultural references.

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. The witch house installation opens outwards too, 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 echoes ideas of the “metabolic museum”, where collections are treated as active, changeable systems rather than fixed displays.

At the exhibition’s centre sits a 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 for the exhibition.

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