We are delighted to present The Snake, by Delaine Le Bas, opening at the worm on 15 December 2022 at 6 pm. The third chapter in the evolving New Aberdeen Bestiary project, The Snake interrogates dominant narratives of history to speculate and imagine what may be the truths beneath, the mass of individual stories and memories that make up lived experiences. In the spires of fabric and paper, words shed their skin, permutating across time and cultures, weaving silenced stories of prejudice, racism and violence, meshing into new mythologies, new wondrous monsters that manifest hidden truths.

At once the centre of the exhibition and every one of its radiating nerve endings, the snake rapidly dissolves in different directions, rippling through the works under changing guises. More often than not, the reptile meets the human, in chimeric half-snake half-woman forms, a creature halfway between this world and an otherworldly, subterrain dimension. In this hybrid form, challenging and subverting its canonical representation in Christian iconography, the snake appears coiled around the tree of wisdom, its guardian and protector. This is echoed in the Greek myth of Python, a giant snake—which some sources describe as half-woman half-snake—that used to guard the Delphi oracle, one of the most important oracles and sacred places in the ancient world.

As a guardian and a protector, the snake moves into the story of Medusa. Once a beautiful woman, Medusa was violated by Poseidon in one of Athena’s temples. In retaliation, the goddess turned Medusa’s hair into a nest of snakes and cursed her gaze to turn into stone whoever it rested upon. Medusa was then killed by Perseus, who gifted her head, with her petrifying eyes still open, to Athena. The goddess wore it on her aegis, an armour cloak that became her symbol and a metaphor for protection. Medusa’s head then becomes an apotropaic talisman, much like the evil eye, warding off evil as it itself hosts evil, with its deathly stare. In The Snake, Medusa appears screenprinted onto paper and, importantly, fabric. By writing Medusa’s story on the large sheets of rigid, thin see-through fabric, Le Bas casts clothing as a form of protection as well as knowledge and recognition. In the space of The Snake, however, reminiscent of a snake’s moulting and shedding of skin, clothing becomes also a transformative element, a moment of rebeginning and reinventing.

The story of Medusa, particularly her immobile head, her scream frozen by her own stare, ripples throughout art history. Le Bas’ Medusa nods to Caravaggio’s reincarnation, in his sixteenth-century painting on a convex wooden shield. Caravaggio’s Medusa is actually the artist’s self-portrait; similarly, Le Bas finds in Medusa a double and a host for her own scream. Medusa’s agony is a cry of terror and bewilderment, of facing death in yourself. There is something, however, in the depiction of a scream, that makes its silence suddenly and undeniably manifest. A muted scream is a cry that can’t be heard—an abyss of loneliness in the muted throat. Le Bas incarnates Medusa, fixing their twined screams on the surface of an etching plate, which brings the technique close to its origins in armoury decoration. In approaching the myth, Le Bas is interested in Medusa’s loneliness, cursed for a wrong in which she was the victim and not the perpetrator. That scream is the outcry of a wronged woman, all her rage.

In the same way that myths and images shift and change every time a different person holds them in their hands, so do words. Gypsy, gypcian, Egyptian. Unravelling the origins of the word ‘Gypsy’ through its sequence of changes and variations, Le Bas is interested both in the word’s roots in misappropriation and prejudice, and in the stylings of a word as is so unfixed, as it moves from one speaker’s mouth to the next. And it how it is not a word of self-determination, but one of imposition, a word used by settled populations not only to indicate Gypsy people and communities, but to set them apart as others. Le Bas playfully reappropriates the fluidity of the word in its many appearances as a defiant act of resistance to the violence of categorisation.

The effort to excavate inner resonances, return words to their origins and tease out connections and relations between them, manifests itself in Le Bas’ work in a sustained practice of cataloguing, numbering, archiving. Working from a reserve of knowledge related to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller history that is often housed in archives within large institutions, but that is not always catalogued with the same rigour as material belonging to settled European peoples, or is mislabelled or boxed in the wrong category, Le Bas is concerned with weaving an alternative narrative of history that pays attention to all the ways that any historical narrative is biased and incomplete. Her highly personal system of naming and dating works functions as a sort of index sheet, except the label is incorporated in the work, inextricable from it—to indicate that we can never, really, stretch too far from the systems we are part of.
—Enxhi Mandija

About Delaine Le Bas

Delaine Le Bas (Worthing, 1965) is a cross disciplinary artist creating installations, performance, photography and film. She studied at St Martins School of Art in London, and has exhibited work and performed across the UK and Europe. She was one of the sixteen artists who were part of Paradise Lost: The First Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. She worked with her late husband, artist Damian Le Bas (1963-2017) on their installations Safe European Home? and projects Gypsy Revolution, Gypsy DaDa, and in 2017 producing the stage artworks and costumes together for Roma Armee. Delaine created Romani Embassy in 2015. Delaine has created performance text works with her son, writer Damian James Le Bas. Delaine’s most recent commission was for Radical Landscapes at Tate Liverpool 2022 and she will be presenting The House Of Le Bas: Established 1984 at Whitechapel Gallery Archive, Whitechapel Gallery London in 2023 and has a solo exhibition at Secession Vienna Summer 2023.

Exhibition views

Related events

Privacy Policy

Effective date: April 24, 2018

Peacock Visual Arts Limited (“us”, “we”, or “our”) operates the https://peacockvisualarts.com website (the “Service”).

This page informs you of our policies regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data when you use our Service and the choices you have associated with that data.

We use your data to provide and improve the Service. By using the Service, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this policy. Unless otherwise defined in this Privacy Policy, terms used in this Privacy Policy have the same meanings as in our Terms and Conditions, accessible from https://peacockvisualarts.com

Definitions

Personal Data
Personal Data means data about a living individual who can be identified from those data (or from those and other information either in our possession or likely to come into our possession).

Usage Data
Usage Data is data collected automatically either generated by the use of the Service or from the Service infrastructure itself (for example, the duration of a page visit).

Cookies
Cookies are small pieces of data stored on a User’s device.

Data Controller
Data Controller means a person who (either alone or jointly or in common with other persons) determines the purposes for which and the manner in which any personal data are, or are to be, processed.
For the purpose of this Privacy Policy, we are a Data Controller of your data.

Data Processor (or Service Providers)
Data Processor (or Service Provider) means any person (other than an employee of the Data Controller) who processes the data on behalf of the Data Controller.
We may use the services of various Service Providers in order to process your data more effectively.

Data Subject
Data Subject is any living individual who is the subject of Personal Data.

User
The User is the individual using our Service. The User corresponds to the Data Subject, who is the subject of Personal Data.

Information Collection And Use
We collect several different types of information for various purposes to provide and improve our Service to you.

Types of Data Collected

Personal Data
While using our Service, we may ask you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information that can be used to contact or identify you (“Personal Data”). Personally identifiable information may include, but is not limited to:

We may use your Personal Data to contact you with newsletters, marketing or promotional materials and other information that may be of interest to you. You may opt out of receiving any, or all, of these communications from us by following the unsubscribe link or instructions provided in any email we send or by contacting us.

Usage Data
We may also collect information how the Service is accessed and used (“Usage Data”). This Usage Data may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocol address (e.g. IP address), browser type, browser version, the pages of our Service that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data.

Tracking Cookies Data
We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to track the activity on our Service and hold certain information.
Cookies are files with small amount of data which may include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a website and stored on your device. Tracking technologies also used are beacons, tags, and scripts to collect and track information and to improve and analyze our Service.
You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our Service.

Examples of Cookies we use:
Session Cookies. We use Session Cookies to operate our Service.
Preference Cookies. We use Preference Cookies to remember your preferences and various settings.
Security Cookies. We use Security Cookies for security purposes.

Use of Data
Peacock Visual Arts Limited uses the collected data for various purposes:

Retention of Data
Peacock Visual Arts Limited will retain your Personal Data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use your Personal Data to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.
Peacock Visual Arts Limited will also retain Usage Data for internal analysis purposes. Usage Data is generally retained for a shorter period of time, except when this data is used to strengthen the security or to improve the functionality of our Service, or we are legally obligated to retain this data for longer time periods.

Transfer Of Data
Your information, including Personal Data, may be transferred to — and maintained on — computers located outside of your state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the data protection laws may differ than those from your jurisdiction.
If you are located outside United Kingdom and choose to provide information to us, please note that we transfer the data, including Personal Data, to United Kingdom and process it there.
Your consent to this Privacy Policy followed by your submission of such information represents your agreement to that transfer.
Peacock Visual Arts Limited will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and no transfer of your Personal Data will take place to an organization or a country unless there are adequate controls in place including the security of your data and other personal information.

Disclosure Of Data

Disclosure for Law Enforcement
Under certain circumstances, Peacock Visual Arts Limited may be required to disclose your Personal Data if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (e.g. a court or a government agency).

Legal Requirements
Peacock Visual Arts Limited may disclose your Personal Data in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to:

Security Of Data
The security of your data is important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Data, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

“Do Not Track” Signals
We do not support Do Not Track (“DNT”). Do Not Track is a preference you can set in your web browser to inform websites that you do not want to be tracked.
You can enable or disable Do Not Track by visiting the Preferences or Settings page of your web browser.

Your Rights
Peacock Visual Arts Limited aims to take reasonable steps to allow you to correct, amend, delete, or limit the use of your Personal Data.
Whenever made possible, you can update your Personal Data directly within your account settings section. If you are unable to change your Personal Data, please contact us to make the required changes.
If you wish to be informed what Personal Data we hold about you and if you want it to be removed from our systems, please contact us.
In certain circumstances, you have the right:

You have the right to data portability for the information you provide to Peacock Visual Arts Limited. You can request to obtain a copy of your Personal Data in a commonly used electronic format so that you can manage and move it.
Please note that we may ask you to verify your identity before responding to such requests.

Service Providers
We may employ third party companies and individuals to facilitate our Service (“Service Providers”), to provide the Service on our behalf, to perform Service-related services or to assist us in analyzing how our Service is used.
These third parties have access to your Personal Data only to perform these tasks on our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for any other purpose.

Analytics

We may use third-party Service Providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our Service. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network.
You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visits activity.
For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy Terms web page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/

Payments
We may provide paid products and/or services within the Service. In that case, we use third-party services for payment processing (e.g. payment processors).
We will not store or collect your payment card details. That information is provided directly to our third-party payment processors whose use of your personal information is governed by their Privacy Policy. These payment processors adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover. PCI-DSS requirements help ensure the secure handling of payment information.

The payment processors we work with are:
PayPal or Braintree
Their Privacy Policy can be viewed at https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full

Links To Other Sites
Our Service may contain links to other sites that are not operated by us. If you click on a third party link, you will be directed to that third party’s site. We strongly advise you to review the Privacy Policy of every site you visit.
We have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.

Children’s Privacy
Our Service does not address anyone under the age of 13 (“Children”).
We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Children has provided us with Personal Data, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected Personal Data from children without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from our servers.

Changes To This Privacy Policy
We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page.
We will let you know via email and/or a prominent notice on our Service, prior to the change becoming effective and update the “effective date” at the top of this Privacy Policy.
You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.

Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us:
By email: alison@peacockvisualarts.co.uk

Cookies policy

Last updated: April 24, 2018

Peacock Visual Arts Limited (“us”, “we”, or “our”) uses cookies on the https://peacockvisualarts.com website (the “Service”). By using the Service, you consent to the use of cookies.

Our Cookies Policy explains what cookies are, how we use cookies, how third-parties we may partner with may use cookies on the Service, your choices regarding cookies and further information about cookies.

What are cookies
Cookies are small pieces of text sent to your web browser by a website you visit. A cookie file is stored in your web browser and allows the Service or a third-party to recognize you and make your next visit easier and the Service more useful to you.
Cookies can be “persistent” or “session” cookies. Persistent cookies remain on your personal computer or mobile device when you go offline, while session cookies are deleted as soon as you close your web browser.

How Peacock Visual Arts Limited uses cookies
When you use and access the Service, we may place a number of cookies files in your web browser.
We use cookies for the following purposes:

We use both session and persistent cookies on the Service and we use different types of cookies to run the Service:
Essential cookies. We may use essential cookies to authenticate users and prevent fraudulent use of user accounts.
Preferences cookies. We may use preferences cookies to remember information that changes the way the Service behaves or looks, such as the “remember me” functionality of a registered user or a user’s language preference.
Analytics cookies. We may use analytics cookies to track information how the Service is used so that we can make improvements. We may also use analytics cookies to test new advertisements, pages, features or new functionality of the Service to see how our users react to them.

Third-party cookies
In addition to our own cookies, we may also use various third-parties cookies to report usage statistics of the Service, deliver advertisements on and through the Service, and so on.

What are your choices regarding cookies
If you’d like to delete cookies or instruct your web browser to delete or refuse cookies, please visit the help pages of your web browser.
Please note, however, that if you delete cookies or refuse to accept them, you might not be able to use all of the features we offer, you may not be able to store your preferences, and some of our pages might not display properly.

For the Chrome web browser, please visit this page from Google.
For the Internet Explorer web browser, please visit this page from Microsoft.
For the Firefox web browser, please visit this page from Mozilla.
For the Safari web browser, please visit this page from Apple.
For any other web browser, please visit your web browser’s official web pages.

Where can you find more information about cookies
You can learn more about cookies and the following third-party websites:
AllAboutCookies.
Network Advertising Initiative

Delivery & Returns

Delivery
At Peacock Visual Arts we have been dealing with delicate artworks on a daily basis, for over 40 years. Our staff are trained in securely and professionally packaging a print, ready for shipment all over the world. Firstly, the print is protected by specialist tissue paper. Depending on the size of the print, it will then either be carefully rolled up in a tube or packaged flat using tough cardboard and bubble wrap. Your print will be delivered fully insured. We aim to deliver within 3-5 working days for UK orders, within 7-14 days for European destinations and within 12-24 days for the rest of the world.

Returns
If for any reason you are not satisfied with your purchase, please call us first on +44 1224 639539 to return the item within 14 days for an exchange or refund in the form of original payment. The item returned must be packaged in its original way and in saleable condition. Shipping and handling charges are not refundable, unless the print has been lost or damaged in transit (see ‘Damages’ for more info). Return the package insured to: Peacock Visual Arts Ltd 21 Castle Street Aberdeen AB11 5BQ United Kingdom We will credit your original payment method within 3 days of confirmation of receiving your returned print. If you have requested an alternative, we will ship this as soon as we have confirmed receipt of the original print. Transit times will be the same as detailed in your original order. For more information, please call our Customer Service representative on +44 (0)1224-639539 or email info@peacockvisualarts.co.uk.

Damages
At Peacock Visual Arts we do our utmost to ensure that every print is sent to you in perfect condition, but we know that occasionally things can get lost or damaged in transit. Please inspect your print upon delivery. In the unlikely event that it has arrived damaged, please contact us immediately on +44 1224 639539 or email info@peacockvisualarts.co.uk. Keep all of the original packaging and we will arrange a courier to pick up your re-packaged print and issue you with a replacement print or full refund in the form of original payment. If you have requested a refund, we will credit your original payment method within 3 days of confirmation of receiving your returned print. Alternatively, if you have requested a replacement, we will ship this as soon as we have confirmed receipt of the original print. Transit times will be the same as detailed in your original order. The majority of our prints are limited editions so their stock is restricted in number. Whilst we do everything we can to issue you with a replacement, occasionally the print edition will have run out. In this situation, we can offer you a full refund or store credit note so that you can choose an alternative. We cannot accept prints back unless they are in their original packaging.