To get to Newcastle Contemporary Art, visitors will likely pass Grey’s Monument. The towering, slender highlight marker of the architecturally glorious Grainger Town district of the city, has performances on each of its stepped base’s four sides. There are flag-waving activists for Palestine to the south, a megaphone-grasping Christian preacher to the north, a guitar-wielding busker with a large audience to the east, and to the west side – facing the 1970s urban disaster that is Eldon Square shopping centre – are a crowd of seated teenagers, many clasping the recognisable Greggs paper bags from any of the 11 branches within short-walking distance.

Newcastle is a city of performativity and stories. From choruses rising from the Gallowgate End of St James’ Park and the rutting rituals of the boozy Bigg Market to the grand Georgian Theatre Royal and sci-fi poop of Norman Foster’s Glasshouse home of the Northern Sinfonietta (formerly called The Sage, and yes, I know it’s in Gateshead…) it is a city of drama. Even the urban fabric feels like spectacular scenography, with grand bridges crashing into buildings, Piranesian vantages, and an energetic clash of architectural histories, it’s a place that feels to be a stage built for daily Geordie performances.




Newcastle Contemporary Art is a new addition to the city, and it is also a platform for unexpected, energetic, and punchy performance. It’s found along an alley off Grey Street, not a route someone that wasn’t looking for either a nearby karaoke bar or a dark corner to piss into on a Friday night crawl may normally take. But they should. Once they navigate the ground floor lobby of the newly-opened High Bridge Works cultural hub packed with organisations from celebrated designers Seymourpowell to independent photographers and Harper Perry architects.

After the lobby, visitors would need to pass a corridor then take a lift up four floors, but then they will be rewarded with one of the finest spaces for contemporary art in the country – a sawtooth roof referencing industrial typology and offering a quality of light needed for both manufacturing and cultural display. This could be a problem for Newcastle Contemporary Art, how do you entice people – especially a new, non-artgoing crowd, down a side street and past all those thresholds away from the many offers of the city to persuade them to spend time in two top-floor galleries of experimental contemporary art?

Those that do are in for a treat. Artist Delaine Le Bas – who works between performance, painting, installation, and even clothes – has transformed Newcastle Contemporary Art’s two spatial rooms into womb-like, enclosing, disorientating canvas-slung spaces. Using huge swathes of calico, a material usually used to mock up fashion patterns, on the walls and covering the floor with an off-white paper, Le Bas has in a sense created clothing to conceal a building.




Inhabited, the spaces have the feeling of a pop-up sketchbook. Paint marks and sprawled texts cover the floor, objects and materials are affixed to the calico walls, and large sculptures present a totally immersive Le Bas world. The largest sculpture looks like a line drawing made 3D, an outline rendering of a carriage made from bendable wire – a model liable to distort and bend each time it is packed up and reformed for exhibition.

The carriage epitomises Le Bas’ work. It presents a playfulness, performativity, and welcome sense of artwork as process rather than precious, aura-emitting art object. It also immediately speaks to the artist’s Gypsy Roma Traveller identity – the carriage not a perfect replica but more of a ghostly or romantic memory of a key part of Le Bas’ story.

Her identity recurs in other ways through the space, not least because the marks and texts all around were made largely by the artist’s own body and hands over two performances, turning the largely white, recessive space into an active site of trace, residue, impact, and intuition. In the artworld, a performance is often said to “activate an artwork,” a somewhat tired phrase that often just means “there was a performance near some artworks,” but here it is fundamentally true, as the monumental, building-encompassing installation only took form and presence through these two activations.




In the first performance, held early in Le Bas’ weeks in the space building the installation, the carriage and other key elements of the installation were constructed and the aesthetic of the space developed. The second performance, held on the official opening night of the exhibition, further developed the red and black aesthetic and layering into the space, the painted feet of Le Bas and two performers (long-time collaborator and trans activist Hḗrā Santos with Ronke Osinowo) leaving a printed trail around the gallery spaces. Occasionally, Le Bas would use the paint to write phrases, sentences, and fragments onto the surfaces: “In this world”, “Fabricate, Verb, Ger, 1.Invent, 2. Construct”, “Off kilter always”, “Red threads and silver needles”, and “Speak the Truth.”

This last phrase, Speak the truth, is also the title of the performances which speak to the idea of stories, myths, recounting, and memory – a phrase told to Le Bas by her nan, who died three years ago but lives on in both meaning and intent in this work. With music, procession, making, marking, and clothing, the trio activated the space and turned the space into a growing and immersive artwork of not just Le Bas’s stories, but also the fights and power of her fellow performers and, indeed, of the audience present in such energy.

Their performances took them around the two galleries and over a symbolic bridge with a floor-surface made of industrial sandpaper sheets, creating a strange underfoot feel and noticeable shift from the papered floor, and balustrades formed of the image of pollarded trees from Le Bas’ Sussex home. En route they added to the red and black graffito, engaged the various sculpted bodily forms (human and horse) dotted around, and navigated long, hanging canvases onto which Le Bas had drawn dripping-paint bodies. The body is present throughout, not just based on Le Bas’ own, but as metaphor for lives (human and nonhuman) lived, and the stories they have experienced and enacted. This perhaps includes the building’s own story, here redressed in calico and in the latest stages of a life began in 1903 as a warehouse and, more recently, undergoing renovation by Viennese architects Jabornegg & Pálffy, transforming. It too is a body with history, future, and stories to tell.




The whole show, work and performances, sits under the title +Fabricating my Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles, words that speak to Le Bas’ ongoing interest in making, stitching, and costume, as well as the act of storytelling, truth, and who speaks of whose histories. A central core of the performances and after the installation is a thick red thread running horizontally across the slung calico walls, stitched into the installation over the performances with a huge, specially made, silver needle. Le Bas’ large canvases often have an afterlife as clothes, cut into patterns and then worn, washed, reworn, and rewashed by the artist until colours dissipate.

Here, the stitching is at the scale of a building, and it seems that this idea of costume and pattern is considered the same by the artist at any scale, whether human or architecture it is simply an act of adding layers and fabrication to existent bodies in order to ensure stories, histories, and surfaces are seen. Some artists do this by placing works into a space, Le Bas does it by creating a new space within the space.

Delaine Le Bas has been working with such elements as fabric, sculpture, and performance for a career that for many years saw collaborations with her husband, Damian, including on designs, costumes, and texts for Roma Army at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre in 2017. That same year, Damian La Bas passed away, though an exhibition currently on at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix gallery in London, who also represent Delaine Le Bas, presents several of his subversive maps that overlay Roma history onto imperial and colonial histories. In his work, there are clearly politics and energy, but also a wit and play, elements undoubtedly also present in Delaine Le Bas’ work at Newcastle Contemporary.




Outside of the gallery, the steps of Grey’s Monument are still a site of congregation. The activists, busker, and preacher have gone, but it’s a now a meeting point for the night about to unfold. Through history, it has also been a place of coming together and as a site for political activism and facing a hotel that was a Suffragettes meeting place. With Le Bas’s work, Newcastle Contemporary Art have shown that their new gallery can also offer a space for such protest, fight for change, recognition, and progression.

Newcastle Contemporary Art is still stitching its own story. Founded three years ago as a space for risk-taking, accessible culture, it now faces the difficult stage of maturing and securing itself in the city. The first salaried Director, Dr. Harriet Sutcliffe (who curated the exhibition of Matt Rugg at Hatton Gallery, covered in 2023, see 00142), curated Delaine Le Bas’ exhibition and will now oversee a programme mixing internationally renowned artists with local and community projects.

The big challenge, however, may be less the curation of the two wonderful top-floor galleries and more the act of opening up the building to the public and removing the difficulty of bringing a wider public, and perhaps a non-traditional art-going public, past the thresholds of alleyway, entrance, corridor, and lift, in order to experience the curations. If a fraction of the buzz, energy, and activism of the steps around the Grey’s Monument can be persuaded to process from the streets into the gallery, then the stories placed into the building by Le Bas with Sutcliffe’s first exhibition in Newcastle Contemporary Art might be continued with many more, from many people.