Delaine Le Bas, Leap
Maureen Paley, London
2026
Delaine Le Bas presents a body of work that refuses the distinction between personal mythology and political reality. Across sculpture, textiles, glass, and installation, Leap explores identity not as a fixed condition but as a continuous process of negotiation, shaped by memory, displacement, and cultural inheritance.
At the centre of the exhibition stands The Goddess, a hybrid figure assembled from found materials and handmade elements. Rather than functioning as a symbol of stability or origin, the work appears as a fragile and constantly evolving presence, carrying traces of both vulnerability and resistance. Throughout the exhibition, acts of collecting, stitching, and assembling become strategies for reimagining histories that have often been excluded from dominant narratives.
Delaine Le Bas, Goddess, wickerwork torso, calico, hand-stitched cotton, needles, vintage handkerchief with embroidery, safety pins, acrylic marker, glitter, spray paintmask: embroidery, ribbons, sequins, felt, appliqué, 277 × 210 × 170 cm
The exhibition’s strongest moments emerge from its embrace of contradiction. Le Bas moves between craft and spectacle, intimacy and performance, individuality and repetition. Her Murano glass works, produced in pairs yet deliberately marked by difference, extend this inquiry into the tension between reproduction and singularity. Objects are never identical; identity itself remains unstable and unresolved.
Rather than offering a straightforward statement about marginalisation, Leap stages a space in which inherited structures of visibility and exclusion are continuously challenged. The exhibition proposes movement as both method and metaphor, suggesting that transformation requires neither arrival nor resolution, but the willingness to remain in a state of becoming.
Delaine Le Bas, 1984 Part II, mixed media on fabrics, 210 × 52 cm
Exhbition view: Delaine Le Bas, Leap, Maureen Paley, London, 2026
Delaine Le Bas, Witches Bottle, murano glass with steel and glass base on burnt wooden plinth bottle and stand, 46.5 × 33 × 33 cm
Exhbition view: Delaine Le Bas, Leap, Maureen Paley, London, 2026
Delaine Le Bas, Blue House, murano glass, 29 × 17.5 × 37.5 cm, 2026
