- Venue
- Campbell Works
- Location
- South East England
I don’t often feel inadequate but thinking about the work of Delaine Le Bas leaves me feeling so.
Not because of the work itself which has an integrity and a disturbing fresh beauty that shines through but because of the subject matter. Delaine Le Bas is from a Romany background and her work is a powerful reflection of her heritage.
The Campbell Works’ press release begins: ‘Distorted ideologies and contemporary colonialist language continue to this day to extinguish the true inheritance of The Romany People.’
If this sums up how as a nation we carry an ingrained fear towards any form of otherness then, paradoxically, in today’s politically correct climate this prejudice shows itself in a fear of getting it wrong. A subject like this brings out the worst sort of lazy, lame ignorance in us all, as was evident at the private view, as visitors were overheard to trip over themselves, when uttering murmured-versions of words like: ‘gypsy’, ‘traveller’ and ‘Romany’, while, presumably wondering which was the politically correct form used today? It is true as a nation we seem to thrive on sameness. Sameness is the great leveller but difference is more difficult, more challenging to our own sense of self, and the tribe we may think we belong to.
In Witch Hunt at Campbell Works, Stoke Newington, London, it is this idea of difference that Delaine Le Bas attempts to bring to our attention. Recent versions of Witch Hunt have been shown at Aspex (Portsmouth), Chapter (Cardiff) and Context (Derry). At Campbell Works one enters a small room that is wholly engulfed by a tented affair. Beautiful coloured streamers cover the entrance, and one feels one might be entering a May Day Celebration – all is well with the world – yet on entering the structure, straight away the viewer becomes disorientated by the mass ensemble of writing, embroidery and imagery. At the back is only what can be described as a whole wall-sized altar to childhood. However, this is a distorted, disturbed version where a child’s duvet cover takes centre stage forming a backdrop. Looking closer at the printed images, one wonders how would a child sleep, covered by a design that depicts soldiers, guns and warfare? The viewer then begins to look at the assembled masked toys more closely.
Elsewhere, brightly coloured and similarly masked manikins, wearing crowns of flowers, stand, appearing to watch a home-made rag-doll who is slung forward on a child’s rocking horse, her pink squashy head thrust through a toy guillotine. While, all around, reproduction black and white prints portray visual narratives of the infamous witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
As a nation, we love a scapegoat, someone to blame, someone to hold responsible for the ills of the world. Today we talk about the organised gangs of pickpockets – eastern European ‘gypsies’ who flock round tourists, stealing their wallets – in cities like Rome, Paris and London, or who perform organised ‘begs’ for money, lining the pockets of dark, unshaven gang-masters. Four hundred years ago, the prints portray the images of white men on horses hunting down and burning women at the stake, for no other reason than prejudice against difference. Evidence of a missing or deformed limb, a propensity towards miscarriage, or some form of mental illness; society casting them as misfits.
For the viewer one of the most disturbing elements of the installation is the reappearance several times of the appliquéd life-size shape of a woman’s body with a thin, dragging, misshapen leg. Perhaps an allegory of the artists own feeling of her uneasy place in this world.
Le Bas’s installations are always a mutiny of colour, design and bric-a-brac. In some ways over-the-top, overwhelming and all too much, yet through it all one feels the tension of pride, sadness and anger pulling at our consciousness, as Delaine Le Bas attempts to explain visually: ‘This is not a lifestyle choice, it is real life steeped in a cultural history that spans time as well as continents, and that has a language which maintains roots from its original homeland’.
In all of Delaine Le Bas’s oeuvre it is the idea of difference and scapegoating that she attempts to bring to our attention. Obviously race, otherness, and exclusion are eye-wateringly complicated subjects, and I am still not quite sure how clear Delaine Le Bas’s message is, or how deep my own ignorance is. Yet, in the end, one is left with a sense of unease coupled with a feeling that integrity has been maintained. Like a brilliant poem where the literal meaning is obscure but one is still left with a profound physical sensation of the urgency and meaningfulness of the message.
ends
Campbell Works is run by Neil Taylor and Harriet Murray.
