On 11th March 2025, Delaine Le Bas, shortlisted for the 2024 Turner Prize, joined the Refugee Buddy Project’s Stich for Change workshop at the Del A Warr Pavillion. She shared her practices, images of her work and spoke to us of its meanings and methods. Her work is transdisciplinary, using textiles, performance, storytelling to address political as well as personal and emotional subjects, primarily developing from belonging to the Romani people. It celebrates Romani identity, history and rich cultural heritage, as well as highlighting the persecution and negative stereotyping that they face. The work is rooted in protest, upholding human rights, in feminism, as well as in reclaiming narratives and portrayals of identity and culture. It is described as a lifelong practice of artistic resistance.
The themes are particular and personal, yet at the same time universal in their application, incorporating issues that intersect broadly with refuge and asylum, the movement of people, racial discrimination and prejudice, and precarity faced by stereotyped and marginalised groups. They incorporate the artificiality of physical borders, as well as personal and political boundaries, what it means to always be the outsider and questions of belonging and home – all of which speak to experiences of displacement, asylum seeking and refuge.
Many of her installations include soft fabric figures, one she said represents Mendacity, and sits atop the work, reaching for its absent heart. She uses fabric liberally – as canvas, structure, tablet. It is layered, embroidered, printed, graffitied, vandalised. Delaine describes it as easily transportable, and therefore, more accessible to those who want to exhibit her work but do not possess the budgets often required for curating exhibitions involving large installations or wall mounted pieces. She also uses what she describes as ‘precarious materials’, evident in the imposing and majestic ‘Goddess’ piece, and materials to hand, typically used in precarious living conditions. Textiles, she says, are powerful – they are a focus of attention, or photographs, in marches protest, and in claiming identity. They are what we wrap, adorn ourselves in, sleep in, and we reuse and recycle them. She wants people to ‘be in the work’ and make difficult circumstances into something beautiful.
In conversation with Delaine she described to me her project ‘Romani embassy’ – highlighting the lack of representation for Romani people – the lack of a national embassy to represent them in times of trouble. Reflecting on her words, the message seemed to strike true also for refugees and asylum seekers, who make-up much of the audience, who having left countries of origin, and having applied for asylum in the UK, forfeit any representation offered by that country of origin, are even considered traitors to them. In the UK, their avenues for representation and addressing their particular needs are limited, the state offering a ‘hostile environment’, a default scepticism of claims to persecution, or risks involved in returning, and carceral inhospitality.
Her work marries well with the work and ethos of the Refugee Buddy Project and the Stich for Change workshops. Challenging the status quo, hostility and prejudice, these are form of activism, often subtle, but transformational on a personal and community level, but also countering and gently pushing back against the silencing and isolation imposed by the migration governance regime. In the Stitch for Change workshops, participants challenging unquestioned narratives or migration, through everyday materials and practices and community solidarity.
