Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground
In today’s 5 Minutes With a Friend, we speak with Delaine Le Bas about myth-making, material, and the rituals that shape her work. That conversation offers a fitting entry point to her forthcoming exhibition at The Whitworth this spring. Here, Le Bas invites us into a world where the museum becomes porous, mutable, and alive. Un-Fair-Ground is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition since her Turner Prize nomination in 2024, and it is far from a conventional retrospective. Instead, Le Bas transforms the Whitworth’s special exhibition galleries into an immersive, unruly terrain of painting, sculpture, film, costume, fabric, wallpaper and performance, where histories are unsettled and remade.
Delaine Le Bas - NCA Gallery. Photo credit: Toby Lloyd.
Drawing on the idea of the ‘metabolic museum’, a term proposed by curator and thinker Clémentine Deliss, Un-Fair-Ground rethinks how collections operate and whose stories they serve. Le Bas selects more than 20 works from the Whitworth’s collection, spanning 200 years and multiple media, and embeds them within her own installations. Familiar works, including William Blake’s The Ancient of Days, are reframed alongside pieces from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, creating an improvisational scenography that resists hierarchy and linear interpretation. Here, objects are not isolated on walls but stitched into a wider material environment, where surface, pattern and texture play a central role.
Delaine Le Bas - NCA Gallery. Photo credit: Toby Lloyd.
Magic, folklore and feminist ritual pulse through the exhibition. Across four unfolding parts, Le Bas constructs spaces within spaces: a large-scale ‘witch house’ installation featuring her own wallpaper design, created in dialogue with the Whitworth’s renowned wallpaper holdings; a central stage set that becomes a double-sided performance arena; and new works placed in conversation with artist precursors and peers such as Madge Gill and Ana Maria Pacheco. Textiles and costume function as vessels for transformation, aligning clothing and fabric with ritual, performance and the body.A monumental mural originally created for Glastonbury Festival in 2024 is shown here for the first time in a gallery context, further blurring the boundaries between art, spectacle and lived experience.
Delaine Le Bas - NCA Gallery. Photo credit: Toby Lloyd.
Collaboration sits at the heart of the project. Le Bas has invited Sarah Lee and Leslie Thompson, artists from Manchester-based Venture Arts, to create new work within the exhibition space, foregrounding shared authorship and access. Throughout, her practice challenges institutional formality, replacing it with care, energy and radical hospitality.
In Un-Fair-Ground, the museum becomes a site of transformation rather than containment. It is a place where marginalised voices are centred, where collections breathe differently, and where storytelling is performative, layered and defiantly alive.
Five Minutes with a Friend: Delaine Le Bas
Delaine Le Bas at Glastonbury, 2024, in front of her mural 'Un-Fair-Ground'. Courtesy the artist, ISOR CIC, RTA Collection. Delaine Le Bas was assisted by Rose Waudby.
Delaine, what is your earliest memory of a textile?
A navy blue with white paisley long sleeved dress. It had a pleated ruffle down the front, and a petticoat sewn into it, so it had this fullness to the skirt. I had navy socks and navy leather shoes that were trimmed with white and they had a cross-over strap.
How would you describe what draws you to textiles and the world of making?
I was surrounded by all sorts of fabrics and other materials as a child. My parents had clothes made for us, or would send away for clothes, so we never had clothing like other children. I love fabrics for how I work. They can expand and contract in the installations and paintings. I can create 3-dimensional objects, sculptures, and buildings with them.
Delaine Le Bas, Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Turner Prize 2024. Photography by Alexander Christie. Gallery: Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix
Where do you feel most inspired to work?
Wherever I have the space. The larger the space, the more the expansion and difference in my approach grows.
What has sparked your imagination or inspired you recently?
The Masque of Anarchy, a poem by Shelley, and how it resonates into this present time.
Delaine Le Bas, Red Felt Boots, Incipit Vita Nova, Turner Prize 2024. Photo: Alexander Christie
What is your most treasured textile, and what story does it carry?
My first Red Felt Boots, which my Nan kept and were in her glass cabinet. They were in her eye-line from where she sat in her chair. I re-made them for Incipit Vita Nova for Secession in Vienna, which was then part of my installation for my Turner Prize Nomination in 2024.
Where did you first learn your craft, and who shaped your early approach to making?
It was completely organic. I did only basic sewing at school, but I was always creating things and drawing from an early age with my Uncle Eddie.
Is there a piece of music you return to while you work, that sets the rhythm of your making?
Music is why I went to art school. Polystyrene from X-Ray Spex was a huge inspiration to me. The track 'Identity' was the first time I heard anything that spoke to me about how I felt to be in the world. When I am working, I create playlists that contain all sorts of music. I listen to so much music of all types. As I am typing this, BBC Four is on with Inside Classical - Michael Tippett’s A Child Of Our Time
Delaine Le Bas, 'In This World', Frieze 2025. Photo: Alexander Christie
What material or technique are you currently experimenting with or curious to explore further?
Painting on cottons of all sorts, and lots of dead-stock. Everything has been constantly expanding since I started, and the paintings are becoming larger and larger. But I am always waiting for something else to appear to take me down another path…
If you could collaborate with any maker—past or present—who would it be, and why?
To keep collaborating with my partner Lincoln Cato. It has pushed the work into different materials and scales for many of the recent installations.
What does a perfect day of making look like for you?
To be able to get up and make whatever is in my head to create...
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Further Information:
Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground is showing at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, from 13 February to 31 May 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Delaine Le Bas - NCA Gallery. Photo credit: Toby Lloyd.
All further images as credited in photo captions.