Glasgow International reviews: Cathy Wilkes and Delaine Le Bas - 'the more you look, the more there is to puzzle and delight'

Cathy Wilkes’s GI show explores the Troubles, while Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas sets about subverting stereotypes, writes Susan Mansfield

Cathy Wilkes, Hunterian Art Gallery ****

Delaine Le Bas: Delainia 17071965 Unfolding, Tramway ****

After a gap of three years, Glasgow International, Scotland’s contemporary art biennial, is once again animating spaces large and small across the city. One of the most anticipated shows is Cathy Wilkes’ work at Hunterian Art Gallery, one of five UK commissions supported by the Imperial War Museum’s 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund on a general theme of war and conflict.

Installation view of the Delaine Le Bas exhibition at Tramway PIC: Alan Harvey / SNS Group

Wilkes’ delicate work can be hard to navigate, usually resisting any notion of theme or interpretation. Here, the addition of an up-front theme is transformative.

The starting point of the show is a fabric sculpture of a woman recoiling from a rubber bullet, a reference to activist Emma Groves, shot in the face by a British soldier through the window of her home in Belfast in 1971 and blinded as a result. The rest of the work seems to spring back from that moment, like the slow-motion miasma after a shot is fired.

Not that this show is specifically about Emma Groves, or about the Troubles, amid which Wilkes grew up, but it is about conflict viewed from the domestic sphere. A battered wooden dining chair, decorative wall lamps and delicately positioned children’s clothes all speak to a feminine perspective on trauma and loss. Operating in similar territory to Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon’s 2023 film, The History of the Present, it’s a story less told, but no less powerful.

In this context, a smear of red paint, or the imprint of a hair in what looks like blood, becomes devastating. A big flat square object is wrapped in a wool blanket, a gesture both of care and (in the lexicon of Belfast’s political prisoners) of protest. But it could also be a painting. There is no place for grand, gestural art-making here. The smallest interventions stand for something much bigger. And they are enough.

Work by Cathy Wilkes at the Hunterian PIC: John Devlin / The Scotsman

After the delicacy and restraint of Wilkes’ work, the show by Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas at Tramway couldn’t be more different. She fills Scotland’s biggest art space with a grand-scale installation of painting, sculpture, banners, embroidery, collage, video, sound, performance and words, words, words.

Delainia 17071965 Unfolding (the number is the artist’s date of birth) brings together new and existing work from many of her recent exhibitions, suggesting that all are part of a single whole. Central to her practice is her identity as a British Romani woman, and her exuberant work draws strength in part from subverting stereotypes – reclaiming the image of the witch, for example – and from expanding the conversation to take in feminism, human rights, environmental issues and the conflicts around language itself. It’s an act of anger and resistance and celebration all in one, with a clear protagonist and antagonist. “You have f***** us over for centuries,” she writes. “No more!”

The large space of Tramway 2 is subdivided by a series of calico structures. We encounter a female figure in a “Protest is Peril” t-shirt on the frame of a covered wagon, and a towering goddess sculpture with a snake in each hand and an Egyptian cat deity on her head. There’s an inner tented area in which children play, and an inner-inner area in which witch-like figures run round the perimeter as if they were on lantern slides. There are hay bales and, later, a boxing ring.

Le Bas seems to work simultaneously on large and small scales. She studied Fashion and Textiles, and her embroidery and appliqués are exquisite. It’s worth stopping to look at details, like the gorgeous white dress and veil which – on closer examination – is suspended from a noose. The more you look, the more there is discombobulate, puzzle and delight. This work is so far beyond restraint that you can barely see it with a telescope. But that, too, can be powerful in the right hands.

Cathy Wilkes until 29 September; Delaine Le Bas until 13 October.