{"id":227,"date":"2008-02-10T12:28:41","date_gmt":"2008-02-10T12:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/beta\/?p=227"},"modified":"2013-04-05T19:01:56","modified_gmt":"2013-04-05T19:01:56","slug":"delaine-le-bas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/2008\/02\/10\/delaine-le-bas\/","title":{"rendered":"Delaine Le Bas"},"content":{"rendered":"

2007 was a big year for Romani art. And for Delaine Le Bas. She was part of Venice Biennale\u2019s first Roma Pavilion, which housed an international collection of Romani Gypsy work entitled Paradise Lost. Now with a solo show in Berlin, she tells Ben Cobb, \u201cI just want to be seen as an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

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With its pebbled beach, 19th Century pier and Formica cafes, Worthing is a very English kind of seaside town. It may not sound the likeliest location for a rising star of Romani art but this is where artist Delaine Le Bas was born and lives with her husband Damian, an artist of Irish Traveller extraction, in a small end-of-terrace house. Looking at Le Bas\u2019 magpie-like work \u2013 her intricate embroidery covered in badges, patches and sequins, and her installation pieces made up of dolls and ornaments \u2013 this quiet West Sussex spot, with its heavy quotient of charity shops and abundance of weekend car boot sales, is perhaps the ideal base.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy work is a bricollage of disregarded objects and everyday materials,\u201d 42-year-old Le Bas explains. \u201cI\u2019m constantly collecting. I\u2019d like to think of myself as an archivist but I\u2019m probably just a hoarder. There are massive storage problems at my house because I can never throw any of it out. Luckily my parents have some stables so I keep some stuff there and over at my Nan\u2019s. That\u2019s the advantage of having my family around me in Worthing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The family might be landowners now but it wasn\u2019t long ago that some members were still living on the roadside. \u201cAs a child in the late 60s I remember visiting my relatives in trailers in the lay-bys,\u201d says Le Bas. \u201cWe used to call the trailers zebras because they had chrome stripes on the side. Even right through the 70s it was relatively easy to stop in lay-bys. The main difference is that people are semi-settled now. If they\u2019re not living in houses then they\u2019re in mobile homes. There isn\u2019t the amount of travelling that there was. Before I was small they were travelling all around for work but that work doesn\u2019t exist anymore. For me that is what being a Gypsy was all about: having that freedom of spirit and not being tied down.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It is this bygone era of Gypsies, rather than its modern incarnation, that has had the biggest impact on Le Bas\u2019 art: \u201cI have really strong memories of all the colours and patterns inside those zebra trailers and of my great Uncles who were big characters and completely wild, in particular Alfie who used to fight at fairgrounds for money. I put a modern twist on that older generation in some of my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The drastic change in Romani life over the last 30 years, from a life-on-the-road to a more housebound existence, has meant that many younger Romanies, Le Bas included, feel forced to justify their credentials. \u201cMy background is quite a hard thing to explain to people because most people have a lot of preconceived ideas about Gypsies,\u201d she believes. \u201cThe problem is that generally people hold two stereotypes at the same time. One is of the villain, the idea that Gypsies are always up to no good. The other is a really romanticised notion of barefooted women with floating black hair, running around a field banging a tambourine. If you don\u2019t fit either of those stereotypes, which I definitely don\u2019t, people aren\u2019t sure who you are and if you are what you say you are.\u201d Studying fashion and textiles at St. Martins from 1986-88 doesn\u2019t help either. \u201cIf you go to college people think you can\u2019t be a Gypsy because Gypsies are completely uneducated,\u201d she shrugs. \u201cIt\u2019s an odd position to be in.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Romani roots go back to India; their language shares much with Hindustani. But with no written history, it\u2019s not just outsiders who are short on accurate information. \u201cI haven\u2019t got a clue when my family first came over to England,\u201d admits Le Bas. \u201cThey were obviously here for some time because there\u2019s a cemetery in Hampshire where a lot of my family is buried. The graves go back to my great-great-grandparents.\u201d What is clear is that wherever Romanies travelled, discrimination soon followed. Sadly that prejudice isn\u2019t consigned to the distant past. \u201cYou\u2019ve only got to go back to the 2005 election campaign,\u201d sighs Le Bas. \u201cThere were whole pages in The Sun devoted to revoking the human rights of Gypsies and Travellers. When that was going on there was also that Channel 4 documentary, Kilroy and the Gypsies, where Robert Kilroy-Silk spent a week with a Romani community in Bedfordshire. The morning after that aired my parent\u2019s yard, where they had lived for about 30 years, was sprayed with \u2018Gypos get out!\u2019 and swastikas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certain pieces like Meet Your Neighbours, \u201cwhich was taking The Sun\u2019s headline during the Conservative campaign and turning it on its head\u201d, confront the negative image of Gypsies but, Le Bas is quick to point out, that isn\u2019t the whole story. \u201cLooking at my art as a whole you wouldn\u2019t say, \u2018She must be a Gypsy.\u2019 My work is a lot to do with other social and political issues. It\u2019s about anyone who is on the outside, whatever his or her situation might be. I\u2019m a strong believer that even though you come from a community you\u2019re still an individual. I leave the boxes for everyone else. I just think of myself as an artist, whether that\u2019s a contemporary artist, an outsider artist or a Gypsy artist.\u201d With her 2008 diary booked up with non-Gypsy related shows until November, when she opens a solo exhibition at Galleria Sonia Rosso in Turin, curators obviously agree.<\/p>\n

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2007 was a big year for Romani art. And for Delaine Le Bas. She was part of Venice Biennale\u2019s first Roma Pavilion, which housed an international collection of Romani Gypsy work entitled Paradise Lost. Now with a solo show in Berlin, she tells Ben Cobb, \u201cI just want to be seen as an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[305],"tags":[305,488,53,42,559,45],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDelaine Le Bas | Wonderland<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Delaine Le Bas.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/2008\/02\/10\/delaine-le-bas\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Delaine Le Bas | Wonderland\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Delaine Le Bas.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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