Delaine Le Bas’ installations demand presence and active participation from their audiences. Using painted floors, scented sculptures, interactive and performative elements, the British artist of Romani descent transforms gallery spaces, encouraging audiences to have visceral interactions with her large-scale works. The multimedia artist’s newest solo exhibition, Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles, at Newcastle Contemporary Art in the United Kingdom is on view until August 2, 2025.

In the exhibition, a red thread – a symbol of connection in several folkloric traditions – connects panes of fabric that span multiple rooms. Grounding the space are two giant silver needles, centring the tools used to weave these connections. “We painted on the floor, using the same fabric from the walls and costumes. It’s about getting people to think about the floors and movement—who gets to move and who doesn’t,” said Le Bas in an interview with STIR. The exhibition builds on the themes she has explored in her oeuvre—Romani history, culture and oppression, feminism, issues of race, nationality and movement.

In 2024, Le Bas was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for her exhibition Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna. The new exhibition continues in a similar transdisciplinary vein, with a single multimedia installation stretching across multiple gallery rooms encompassing painting, sculpture, writing, performance, fabric installations and found objects. There is also a participatory element—viewers are invited to add their stitches to parts of the artwork, creating a living tapestry that merges individual and collective histories and actions. The exhibition also includes a series of live performances titled Speak the Truth, with longtime collaborator Hḗrā Santos, who is a performer and artist.

Le Bas joined STIR to discuss her artistic process, sharing how audiences and institutions respond to her work. Edited excerpts of the interview below.

Srishti Ojha: The titles of many of your exhibitions, like Delainia and Fabricating My Own Myth, suggest that your work is intensely individual, but you also maintain a strong focus on marginalised communities, their experiences and political struggles. What is the trajectory of your work—does it begin from within and work its way outwards?

Delaine Le Bas: I start with the personal, my individual feelings about things, but I try to make the actual work more universal, so there's a different way for people to access it. When people come to see it, they’re actually inside the work because it’s an installation. [The viewers] are active participants in it—their bodies are part of the work as well. So even though the titles sometimes are very personal, for example, Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding was my name and date of birth; everyone’s got a name and a date of birth.

Srishti: Your exhibitions are expansive, often seeming to engulf their sites in fabric and multimedia. It’s also important to you to make viewers’ bodies a part of the installation. How is scale significant to your work?

Delaine: I try to think about the space that I'm actually in, whether it’s small or much bigger, like at Tate Britain for the Turner Prize. I’m working with the architecture, but sometimes I’m also working against it by creating another structure inside of it. That’s about presence—[about] coming from a group of people who have not been present in these types of spaces. They've been present in other people's presentations of them, but not as individuals.

I’m also working with fabric to create soft structures, which means they [can go] to other spaces. It’s the same material that’s being [re]used.

Srishti: Your work challenges the authority of the space that you’re in and the boundaries between the artist and audience. How does this work in a gallery setting?

Delaine: Well, it depends on the space. Artist-run spaces, or commercial spaces even, have a sort of independence where you can do certain things that you can’t possibly do in an institutional space for a lot of reasons. Then, it depends on the level of the institution you’re working in. Sometimes you’re being told something won’t be possible because of size or other considerations and a lot of the work is trying to navigate around these areas.

These are the invisible structures that people don't see. They’re walking into a building that represents something. Most of the big institutions, for example, were built in a time of colonialism. We’re going into a space that’s loaded with so much history for so many of us. A place where, historically, we just wouldn’t have been present at all. It’s about not letting that stop you.

Srishti: This exhibition, expanding on your 2021 showcase Zigeuner Sauce, is focused on these biases and how they are inherent to cultural narratives. How important is it to make the ‘fabrication’ of these narratives visible?

Delaine: It’s really important. For example, with ‘fabricating’, which is in the title for this show—it has two meanings. To physically make something, but it can also mean to tell a lie. I’m interested in that opposition in the word. Language and who has power in a language is something that’s been used to dominate society in a negative way.

The other thing I’m trying to get at is: in a time of so much political correctness, there's often something else going on. Like with Zigeuner Sauce (a derogatory term referencing Romani people)—you’re not allowed to use that word in Germany. So when I showed the work there, I...had to put a black line through everything that had that word on it. You say not to use the word, but that hasn't changed how you think about the person whom you used the word against.

Srishti: How did you arrive at your aesthetic and locate your politics within it?

Delaine: I studied fashion and textiles at Central Saint Martins. We sit on fabrics, wear fabrics, we go to bed and find comfort in these fabrics—it has subconscious effects on the way you feel.

A lot of fabrics also contain messages in the patterning, colours, motifs or even [in] the writing that's on them. Originally, when I did [embroidered works] with all the sequins and motifs, they looked very pretty, but [they] were saying something that was quite dark or hard. Using fabrics in the quantities I do is a way of getting that message across that is maybe softer.

Srishti: You collaborated with Hḗrā Santos on a performance piece, Speak The Truth. Could you tell us about how collaboration has influenced your practice?

Delaine: Hḗrā and I have been working together for about seven years now; we have a framework, but we allow for a certain amount of improvisation within that. Most of my collaborations are really long-term, like working with Justin Langlands on sound since 2009 or László Farkas, with whom I make [my] films.

Collaboration is really important to me because I trust the people I work with. Like with Justin, we’ll talk about the work, see the work, do some notations together and I might send him some sound I’ve heard and then just leave him to do his magic. Trust, love and care are really important.

Srishti: As more communities globally are struggling with political uncertainty, what have you noticed about the art and artists emerging from spaces of conflict?

Delaine: I think it’s very important that people and artists have space. When I did Incipit Vita Nova, the first room asks how you make art in chaos and when someone is dying. So many artists and creative individuals are in really terrible circumstances due to politics or war but they will still be creating amazing work. There are organisations like Artists at Risk that are trying to place artists who are in danger in their countries in [safe] living spaces and studios.

I’m appalled that as human beings we’re still doing these terrible things to each other and haven't learned anything from history.

‘Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles’ will be on view at Newcastle Contemporary Art from May 31 – August 2, 2025.