After being nominated for the prestigious Turner prize last year, artist Delaine Le Bas continues to work and expand her creative path. This past weekend, she opened her installation titled Stranger in Silver Walking on Air at The White House, Dagenham, which you can visit until the 27th of September. In it, she tackles Romani culture with a childlike approach, keeping her inner child alive. “The combination of childlike playfulness, complexity of culture, and the subtleties of culture as well as the refusal to not deny the problems from within and from outside. It seems to come naturally,” she tells us in this interview. Today we speak with her about idealised lifestyles, her Nan, and forever learning.
One thing that struck me about your work is how you describe it as responding to domestic claustrophobia. Tell me what you mean by this.
I am speaking of my experience of having domestic tasks and the priority of the domestic space in terms of cleanliness and rules surrounding this, it was very claustrophobic as it dominated each and every day for me from a very early age until I left home. I am sure I am not alone in this. The work is about breaking out from this… subverting and or converting the domestic into a new space of creativity out of the claustrophobia of it.
Does the idealised Roma nomad serve as an antidote to this way of living?
I do not idealise the Roma nomad as an antidote — for many people from all of the communities, they are not necessarily nomadic. Often it was forced, and those that chose it do not idealise it — it was just a way of life. Idealising it belongs to what is coined the Gypset, travelling extensively with unlimited money to spend on locations to visit and places to stay. In terms of nomadism, we were all nomads once and for many who now choose that way of life and who are not part of the Gypset, it is demonised and has been criminalised, making it a more difficult and hard way to live.
How does your installation at Dagenham’s The White House deal with both of these concepts, of the stationary and stagnant versus the free-flowing and mobile?
The whole installation is mobile in terms of how it moves, can move and will accommodate the space being used in various ways not only as an art installation. This has reference to Campo nomadi Constant Nieuwenhuy’s design for a Gypsy Camp in 1957. It incorporates my ongoing use of fabrics to construct environments and structures that can be reformed, recycled, and architecture within architecture. The location is also interesting historically and this area is already beginning to be transformed again due to the Elizabeth Line and the ever expanding city. Funny how town and city planners can be free flowing in terms of where and what they build but the rest of us are supposed not to be.
How does Roma culture inspire you? What aspects of it do you incorporate into your own work and life more broadly?
One of my biggest inspirations was my Nan — she lived outside until she was twenty-one years old, taught herself to read and write, and created a space for me to do what I do today just by allowing me to be. To be tenacious and to always find a way. Survival is the greatest lesson from the culture, listening to the oral histories of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) and Zilli Schmidt (1924-2022), who both survived the Nazi concentration camps. Always remembering Ceija Stojka’s haunting words, “I’m afraid Auschwitz is only sleeping.” Never to be complacent because for any of us chaos or worse can appear at any time. My own lived reality day to day is a constant within the work.
When I think of Romani culture, I immediately think of Tony Gatlif’s depictions of communities singing and playing music with intense passion. How does music weave its way into your practice?
Music is large part of what I do and what drove me to art school — Polystyrene & X -Ray Spex’s Identity was the first time I heard something that I felt addressed how I felt to be in the world. I work with Justin Langlands (Pressure Drop) and we create soundscapes for the installations and films also working with Laszlo Farkas on this. The soundscapes with text are always part of our performances. I listen to music all the time and my late husband collected music, I inherited a huge vinyl collection from him.
Do you ever feel stuck as a visual artist?
No.
In what ways does your new installation challenge existing preconceptions of Roma culture?
I think all my work challenges this as it seems the preconceptions of what Roma culture is or should be are so embedded. Generally, people think they can tell me what they are. My work is always from my own individual perspective; if you asked or looked at what someone else makes or creates, it would be different again. It’s my own individual experience of how it feels to be out in the world, my day-to-day life, and gathering what I see, hear, feel, and producing works that reflect this.
You’ve described how your work contains the universal child within it. Who is that universal child to you?
The universal child in the work is me. Looking out into the world, trying to understand even now in my sixtieth year. Never too old to learn. That there is an implication in all things that happen that at some point it could be me, you, anyone that it is happening to — present or occurring everywhere.
What motifs do you use to bring out that universal child in the viewer’s mind?
Motifs or words that are open to everyone — Mickey Mouse or a smiley emoji, for example. Photographs of myself as a child collaged and moved into and onto different environments and settings. In the garden of the past, the garden of the present, the space of the future…
Do you find easy to balance childlike playfulness with the desire to show the complexity of Romani culture?
The combination of childlike playfulness, complexity of culture, and the subtleties of culture as well as the refusal to not deny the problems from within and from outside. It seems to come naturally working with it all at the same time. Layers of life.
How do you hope your new installation will be perceived in the eyes of the British public?
Titled A Stranger in Silver Walking on Air, at some point somewhere we are all just that Stranger and I know not everyone will necessarily like the work but those that do and who spend time with it will hopefully take something from it. Within the work always there are insights to how when certain things take shape they effect all of us, if not immediately then at some time down the line. The erasure of public space being one, historical and ongoing.
