‘‘The difficulty for me is that there’s not enough subtlety around identity. We’re all more than one thing’’
In the ArtReview Podcast, artists, thinkers and cultural figures are invited to choose three works as lenses through which to examine their practice and explore critical issues impacting the contemporary art world.
In our fourth episode, artist Delaine Le Bas speaks to ArtReview senior digital editor Chiara Wilkinson about Glastonbury, The Color of Pomegranates and the power of the word ‘no’. Her exhibition, Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground, is on at The Whitworth, Manchester, through 31 May 2026.
Listen now on Spotify and YouTube. New episodes drop every fortnight. All of the works referenced in this podcast can be viewed below.
About Delaine Le Bas
Delaine Le Bas is an artist who works across installation, textiles, performance, and painting, exploring ideas of identity, belonging, land and resistance. She comes from a British Gypsy, Romani, Roma and traveller family heritage and her work was included in the first Roma Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
Credits
Interviewer, host and producer: Chiara Wilkinson @chiarawilkinson
Audio editor: Charlie Duffield
Music design: Iona Smith @ic_yonic
Works mentioned, in order of reference
Le Bas’s Un-Fair-Ground (2024), currently on display in Un-Fair-Ground at The Whitworth in Manchester, is a largescale mural which Le Bas made in the Unfairground area of Glastonbury music festival, Somerset, across six days. Against a pink background, Le Bas has painted dancing figures, unicorns, medusa’s head and other references to folklore – even Mickey Mouse – and many of which are recurring motifs across her practice.
Witch House (2026) was also created for Un-Fair-Ground. Following a cobbled street painted on a temporary floor of the gallery, visitors enter a houselike structure featuring a pair of hand-sewn Serbian shoes at its centre, which were taken from The Whitworth’s collection. The interior walls are lined with wallpaper designed by Le Bas, drawing on a headline, ‘Meet Your Neighbours’, from The Sun newspaper, and incorporating text from a Conservative Party policy proposal to repeal the Human Rights Act in ways harmful to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. The work expands her 2009 Witch Hunt, exploring themes of magic and folklore.
Poly Styrene and X Ray Spex, Identity, 1977
Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) is a Soviet-Armenian arthouse film that follows the life of the eighteenth-century poet Sayat-Nova from childhood up to his death. The film unfolds through a symbolic, almost dreamlike visual language, functioning like a moving collage with virtually no dialogue.
During her performance for Un-Fair-Ground, Le Bas recites the lines “As I lay asleep in Italy… to quote Shelley… No came to me again in many voices…”, referencing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy (1819).
