Beneath the wallpaper, the art.

The interior decoration scheme for Delaine Le Bas’s beguiling installation, Witch House, serves as a visual metaphor for her artistic practice. Le Bas, one gathers, as one loses oneself in the entirety of the partially retrospective Un-Fair-Ground she has pitched across a number of The Whitworth’s gallery spaces, is interested in layers of meaning. As well as her own attractions, she has set up stall with kindred practitioners summoned from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection; little seen, but also held by Manchester’s Whitworth. These remembrances of times past, raised from deeper layers, are in turn brought into conjunction with pieces whose surfaces have barely had time to dry, fashioned both by Le Bas and artists from Hulme’s Venture Arts.

If, at times, this profusion has something of a jumble sale quality, with pieces spilling over onto the gallery floor, vying against each other for one’s eye, this seems in line with Le Bas’s intention. Her roots, in part, are parcelled up in the punk of Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex, and the declarative scarlet ‘No’ that recurs like so many lipstick kisses in her more recent works taps into the mythologised moment when the refusal of the ossified now opened up a world of possibilities, its safety pin a symbol at once of imperfection and customisation.

Its stitches showing like sutures bringing life to a series of exquisite corpses, one infers that, in many respects, Un-Fair-Ground is less concerned with individual pieces but with their cumulative effect. Certainly, the chorus that Le Bas orchestrates from the singular voices she calls upon serves as a kind of lo-fi counterpart to the increasingly popular bombast of immersive art shows, projecting and animating at scale across every available surface. Le Bas, one suspects, would argue that all art is immersive. Or, at the very least, that it ought to be.

Back, however, to Witch House. Perhaps the most fully-realised of Le Bas’s Whitworth works, it evokes both the sticky appeal of its fairy-tale counterpart, sweet as candyfloss and baited for unwary children, and the sunshine playroom of the dressing-up box. Topped off by a roof perforated by the paper-play near-symmetries of rounded scissors, its welcoming interior is wallpapered with the colourful unpleasantness of the tabloid witch-hunt against the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community which is Le Bas’s own heritage. In the places where this flypaper for racists has been stripped, however, more lasting verities are revealed – pieces from the gallery’s permanent collection that artfully complicate the picture.

Such is Le Bas’s invitational approach to connection, the pieces produced in collaboration with two of Venture Arts‘ neurodivergent collective sit almost seamlessly alongside her own fabric prints, whether blooming with cellophane flowers, bedecked with death’s heads or outline self-portraits in black, like crime-scene chalked bodies in negative. Presented with due equivalence, Sarah Lee’s All Is Confused By A Horse’s Head, an embroidery work in incremental progress, though distinct in itself, seems in perfect sympathy with Le Bas’s aesthetic.

Even set against the patchwork of slow graffiti that threads her narratives of positive refusal together, the untitled works by Madge Gill that Le Bas has chosen to resurrect set themselves apart. Their inky otherness, which Gill attributed to Myrninerest, a spirit which would work through her as she entered into states of trance, resembles an eruption of visionary light into the prosody of the everyday. If Le Bas is the affirmative ‘no’ writ large, Gill gives voice to its complement, the ineffable ‘yes’.

This apparent paradox is resolved in the crimson thread that connects Le Bas with her collaborators, both in spirit and in the flesh. In a world intent on manufacturing division, they wield pins to bring it together, not as it was, but in new combinations. Opening wide the door to the Witch House, their invitation is to set aside misunderstanding, and step inside love.         

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Delaine Le Bas – NCA Gallery (Toby Lloyd)

 

Un-Fair-Ground is at The Whitworth, Manchester until May 31, 2026. For more information, click here.