Review by Delaine Le Bas – Ex-Turner Nominee Delivers Magicians, Warm Welcome – and Wallpaper | art

“NThe red paint scrawled on the hallway floor screams. “No entry?” I ask as I tentatively step into the gallery. The word appears again and again – always painted in red – across the large piece of fabric that divides the space of the first gallery. Later, this piece adorns the skirt of Delaine Le Bas in a photo in which she stands in a field, holding a sign that says: “No State Control.”

It may seem unwelcoming, but printed amidst the dominant colors of pink, blue and yellow, and repeated like a catchy pop song, it’s doing something else. “It’s a ‘no’ as an affirmation,” says Le Bas. “It’s like: ‘No, then, we must not let them steal our joy.’ It is a cry of protection, like a child stubbornly refusing to give up something precious. The ‘no’ is not directed at us, but beyond us, creating boundaries that suspend reality for a moment and surround the viewer in layers of soft fabric and folklore.”

Un-Fair-Ground creates a space where a spirit of generosity and warmth allows for difficult questions about land, art ownership, and identity. Shaped by her Gypsy heritage, Le Bas—who was a 2024 Turner Prize nominee—is keenly aware of the ways in which structures created to “protect” one thing can be weaponized to the exclusion of another. In Un-Fair-Ground, she flips the story so the protected heritage is hers, taking 20 pieces from the Whitworth collection in service of her story.

Le Bas’s ability to welcome and question in unison pays off in Witch House, a new installation that expands on her 2009 work, Witch Hunt. On a cobblestone street, we enter a quaint house with hand-stitched Serbian shoes in the middle and soft light falling through the calico-covered ceiling. On the walls is vibrant wallpaper, designed by Le Bas in homage to Whitworth’s wallpaper collection, one of the largest in the world.

“Know your neighbours,” the wallpaper advises, as photos of Le Bas as a child mix with illustrations of Delaine and her late husband Damien, cut-outs of dolls, union flags and caricatures. There is the text of a Conservative Party policy request to repeal the Human Rights Act in a way that harms Roma, Roma and Travellers. At some points, the wallpaper is literally torn off by works by William Blake, Joan Miró and Paola Rego from the Whitworth Collection.

This confusion of the usual hierarchies used when displaying art creates connections elsewhere in the display. In L’Archipel en Feu – a triptych of hand-stitched and hand-painted fabrics – animals, nature and bodies blend. A rabbit hopping across vibrant cellophane flowers. Mysterious woman throws the moon. The horse’s head sits atop the female’s body. In Delinia: 1707-1965 Unfolds, a video work projected onto pieces of delicate fabric and a large circular mirror, the characters move in and out of colorful textiles, while the footage transitions to shots of the forest. This kaleidoscope of images reveals the fragmented way in which all human narratives are constructed.

In contrast to the rest of the Rainbow proceedings, the final gallery space is muted, the walls covered in magnolia calico. Most of the works in this space are not by Le Bas; They include pieces by Brazilian sculptor Ana Maria Pacheco, “outsider artists” Madge Gill, and Damien Le Bas. Displaying the works on canvas rather than a solid wall creates a sense of temporality, as if we are gathered here for just one moment. It’s strange, especially with Pacheco’s evil characters who smile at “the endeavors of a certain poet,” but I wonder where all that joy went. Even Le Bas’s works in this room take on a different spirit; Her palette is monochromatic and her paint is thick and heavy. Cloth hands extend from the edges of the calico walls like ghosts trying to lure us inside.

The gallery is named after the artist’s mural Un-Fair-Ground, now in the lobby at the Whitworth Hotel. Originally screened at the Unfairground at Glastonbury Festival in 2024, it takes the visual elements of a fairground – caricatures, clowns and bold colours – and mixes them with stars, eyes, ears, the female form, creatures, iconography and Greek mythology. Above is a huge golden sun, sparkling ethereally under the Whitworth lights. This is not a just land, a place where everything is fair, but an unjust land, where the land is neither just nor unjust, but merely a space of connection – and a glorious, defiant welcome.