Delaine Le Bas review – former Turner nominee delivers witches, warm welcomes – and wallpaper

The Romany artist takes a mural she made for Glastonbury as a starting point, then builds a dizzying series of rooms exploring connection and exclusion

“No” shouts the red paint scrawled across the floor at the entrance. No entry? I wonder as I step tentatively into the gallery. The word appears again and again – always painted in red – across the large sheet of fabric that divides the first gallery space. Later, it decorates Delaine Le Bas’s skirt in a photograph in which she stands in a field, holding a placard that states: “No state control.”

It could seem unwelcoming, but printed amid the prevailing colours of pink, blue and yellow, repeating like a catchy pop song, it does something else. “It is ‘no’ as an affirmation,” says Le Bas. “It is like, ‘No, then, we mustn’t let them steal our joy.’” It’s a shout of protection, like a child stubbornly refusing to relinquish something precious. The “no” is not directed at us, but beyond us, creating a boundary that suspends reality for a moment and cocoons the viewer in layers of soft fabric and folklore.

Un-Fair-Ground establishes a space where a spirit of generosity and warmth allows difficult questions to be asked about land, art ownership and identity. Le Bas – who was a 2024 Turner prize nominee – is shaped by her Romany heritage and keenly aware of the ways in which structures created to “protect” one thing can be weaponised to exclude another. In Un-Fair-Ground she flips the narrative, so the protected heritage is her own, as she takes 20 pieces from the Whitworth’s collection to serve her story.

Le Bas’s ability to welcome and interrogate in unison comes to fruition in Witch House, a new installation that expands on her 2009 work, Witch Hunt. Down a painted cobbled street, we enter an inviting home with hand-sewn Serbian shoes in the centre and dappled light falling through the calico-draped roof. On the walls is a vibrant wallpaper, created by Le Bas in honour of the Whitworth’s wallpaper collection, one of the largest in the world.

“Meet your neighbours”, the wallpaper advises, as photos of Le Bas as a child mingle with illustrations of Delaine and her late husband, Damian, cutouts of dolls, union flags and cartoons. There’s the text of a Conservative party policy request to repeal the Human Rights Act in a way detrimental to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people. At points, works by William Blake, Joan Miró and Paula Rego from the Whitworth’s collection literally tear through the wallpaper.

This scrambling of the usual hierarchies employed when displaying art creates connections elsewhere in the show. In L’Archipel en Feu – a triptych of hand-stitched and hand-painted fabrics – animals, nature and bodies blend. A rabbit hops through vibrant, cellophane flowers; a shadowy woman throws the moon; a horse’s head sits atop a female body. In Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding, a video work projected on to pieces of thin fabric and a large circular mirror, figures move in and out of colourful textiles, while the footage skips to shots of a forest. This kaleidoscope of images exposes the fragmented way in which all human narratives are constructed.

In contrast to the rest of the rainbow proceedings, the final gallery space is muted, the walls draped in magnolia calico. Most of the works in this space are not by Le Bas; they include pieces by Brazilian sculptor Ana Maria Pacheco, “outsider artist” Madge Gill and Damian Le Bas. The presentation of the works on fabric instead of solid wall generates a feeling of temporality, as if we are only gathered here for a moment. It is curious, especially with Pacheco’s sinister figures smirking out of The Endeavours of a Certain Poet, but I wonder where all the joy has gone. Even Le Bas’s works in this room take on a different spirit; her palette is monochrome and her paint is thick and heavy; fabric hands reach out from the edges of the calico walls like spectres trying to pull us in.

The exhibition is named after the artist’s mural, Un-Fair-Ground, which is now in the hallway at the Whitworth. It was originally exhibited at the Unfairground area at Glastonbury festival in 2024, and takes visual elements of a fairground – cartoons, clowns and bold colours – and mixes them with stars, eyes, ears, the female form, creatures, iconography and Greek mythology. At the top is a huge, golden sun, shimmering ethereally under the Whitworth lights. This isn’t Un Fair Ground, a place where all is fair, but an Un-Fair-Ground, where ground is neither fair nor unfair, but just a space for connection – and a glorious, defiant welcome.

• Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground is at the Whitworth, Manchester until 31 May