Delaine Le Bas: Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles

Delaine Le Bas: Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles
31st May, 2025 – 2nd August, 2025
Newcastle Contemporary Art
Highbridge Works
39 High Bridge
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 1EW

At Newcastle Contemporary Art, fabric becomes a site of protest, storytelling, and shared authorship — where needle and thread are instruments of resistance and remembrance.

A new exhibition at Newcastle Contemporary Art reimagines the gallery space as both workshop and stage. Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles, by British artist Delaine Le Bas, brings together textiles, sculpture, and performance in a large-scale installation rooted in questions of identity, authorship, and cultural memory.

Developed during a recent residency, the project spans both of the institution’s main galleries. The result is a visually dense, physically immersive environment where fabric, thread, and needlework serve as tools for storytelling—and challenge. Le Bas, who is of Romani heritage, uses the language of domestic craft to examine broader historical and political themes. Her work draws attention to stories often excluded from official narratives.

At the center of the installation is a recurring red thread, a reference to symbolic traditions across Romani, Greek, and East Asian cultures. It winds through the space as a connective line—literal and metaphorical—linking artworks, histories, and experiences. Two large sculptural silver needles, created for the show, act as both anchors and icons, suggesting labor, tradition, and resistance.

The exhibition is not static. Visitors are invited to contribute their own stitches to the work, adding to its visual and conceptual fabric. This participatory element reflects Le Bas’s interest in community, shared authorship, and the role of making as a form of expression and dissent.

Performance plays a key role. Over the course of the exhibition, Le Bas and long-time collaborator Hḗrā Santos will present a series of live events within the space. These performances—featuring costume, music, and spoken word—serve to activate the installation and highlight the fluid relationship between memory, ritual, and representation.

The title of the exhibition—Fabricating My Own Myth—speaks directly to the artist’s intent. “Fabrication” here refers both to the act of making and to the act of shaping narrative, especially in the face of exclusion or misrepresentation. Through textile work and performance, Le Bas proposes an alternative way of recording and retelling, one that resists simplification.

The result is a project that is at once deeply grounded in material tradition and fully engaged with the present moment. In a space usually reserved for finished works, Le Bas offers something still in process—open to the contributions, voices, and hands of others.

Delaine Le Bas: Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles opens on the 31st of May, 2025 until the 2nd of August, 2025 at Newcastle Contemporary Art

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