Public participation is key to the artist’s metamorphic tapestries, which examine Traveller culture and politicised movement on calico-covered walls
To be in Delaine Le Bas’s exhibition is like being inside a textile or embroidery. The walls are covered in calico, which the artist uses throughout her shows and often repurposes. Red ribbons have been threaded through these hangings, giant needles left in. Several 30cm-long safety-pin sculptures hold parts of the installation together. The floor is paper and has accrued marks, some made by the artist and other fainter ones left by us. We are not in a white cube here so much as in a lived-in off-white cube.
In Greek mythology, Ariadne gave a red thread to lead Theseus through the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Here the artist’s red footprint cover much of the floorspace, and gallery-goers may find themselves faced with decisions about how to navigate it: whether or not to be corralled by the artist’s own route round the room; whether or not to avoid treading on the footprints themselves, just as they would avoid treading on other art objects in the room – the piles of red ribbons, bandaged ballet shoes or horse sculptures. Whether to cross a flat, ground-level sculpture, Bridge (2025), a strip of sandpaper bordered by wood and cutout trees that feels both resistant and satisfying underfoot. Our own movements, hesitant or otherwise, become the subject of the installation.
In an accompanying documentary video by Gary P Malkin, Le Bas mentions people displaced by war and politics the world over, and the barriers certain groups encounter to their movements. Phrases such as ‘Are you a grateful guest?’ are painted on the floor. But the messaging is most articulate when specific, even autobiographical, and the theme of travel is explored referencing the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, to whom Le Bas herself belongs: a group whose movements have always been politicised. Off Kilter (2024), a large wire sculpture of a horse-drawn wagon with wheels, dominates the second of two rooms, and has a fluid, pencil-drawn quality to its lines. Horses are deeply important to Traveller culture, as both working animal and symbol, while also serving to stereotype it in the wider culture and public narratives. Here they demonstrate the versatility of Le Bas’s use of fabric: two horse sculptures of black organdy stuffed with hay and lavender (Incipit Vita Nova, 2023–24) – one draped in a woollen, red-striped and white-crossed blanket, the other laid upon one – are soft monuments; a take on mounted equine statues, made of fodder. In another part of the gallery, a horse’s head emerges from the calico wall hangings (Secession, 2023), a curl of black organdy unfurled, seeming to dissolve as if the whole thing were smoke.
Le Bas has been using textiles to make political art since the late 1980s, and last year was nominated for the Turner Prize. This recognition has come at a time when the establishment and the market have learned to value woven art that conveys social comment, from the found-object tapestries of El Anatsui to Serge Attukwei Clottey’s wall hangings cut from oil jerrycans. But I find Le Bas’s work most powerful on the level of pure craft, texture, material and arrangement: nestled in hammocklike folds of the cream calico are self-portrait rag dolls made throughout the 1990s and early 2000s (Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding, undated). The hair, nipples and vaginas of each are sequinned, as are their exquisitely embroidered canvas-soled, silken ballet shoes. The smallest details can be the most affecting, such as a tiny, improvisatory passage of red stitching, fainter than anywhere else in the room, concealed behind a fold of the wall hanging. When I return to the gallery for a second visit, I can’t find it again. You miss these moments if you aren’t following all the threads.
+ Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles at Newcastle Contemporary Art, 31 May – 2 August
From the September 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
