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 rather than making objects. Painted fabrics, embroidery, collage, sculpture and performance are stitched together into dense, immersive environments that draw on Romany history, myth, pop culture and protest. Questions of nationhood, gender, belonging and survival run through everything, often chaotically. This is art that crowds in, overwhelms, and insists on being encountered bodily.

At The Whitworth, new and recent works are shown in close dialogue with pieces from the gallery’s own collection, creating a conversation across time and tradition. Among the highlights is Un-Fair-Ground, the monumental freestanding mural created for Glastonbury Festival in 2024. It showcases the themes and cultural motifs that energise the artist’s work: ancient, modern, and mythic spirits, alongside political and pop-cultural references.

A newly commissioned installation digs deeper into Le Bas’s long-standing engagement with magic, folklore and witchcraft. This section 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.

At the exhibition’s centre sits a performance space, programmed with live events and creative activities to facilitate new forms of engagement with Le Bas’s work. It’s a reminder that Le Bas’s practice isn’t fixed on the wall – it’s lived, worn, enacted and continually remade.