When we gaze into the embers of a fire, we can see endless stories in the flickering interplay of glow and shadow and ash. In Damian’s images there is the same depth of narrative, yet the stories are not creatures of our own imagination, but paths through the labyrinths of his intersecting universes, real adventures that will not fade like a dying fire but capture forever confrontations of people, ideas and culture.

The Damian of the pictures is in constant dialogue with a cast of bystanders, traders and grafters, with oppressive, but ridiculous and ephemeral authorities, and celebrities like the iconic Elvis,1 but above all with the recurring figures of his wife and son. The ultimate bystander is the one standing watching the drama in the picture. I don’t “see” Damian’s pictures, I watch them, eagerly but warily, half-hopeful, but also half-fearful of what will happen next, of what emotions might be stirred.

For Damian the first complexity is his own identity. Is he an underground musician who just happens to be a professional artist? When he is collecting scrap metal, could Travellers who comment, “Kushti to see you doing a bit of real work, mush!” be half right? He is the outsider who, curiously, seems to be at ease almost anywhere. He stands at the confluence of three diasporic currents, his own family Huguenot and Irish Traveller heritage and the English Romani heritage of his wife and in-laws. Sometimes the allusions to history are mythic – preachers in the forests, potheen in the hills or caravans from India, but more often they are in little details, of clothing or utensils utterly characteristic of their time, place and provenance (but you don’t realise this until Damian picks them out). Not least the cultural specificity is in the written words which are sprinkled across much of his work, sometimes to the point of becoming a torrent of concrete poetry. Phrases in Irish Traveller Cant or Gammon jostle knowingly with various dialects of Romani, and other European languages and argots, scoring witty points off each other. Possessing a linguistic facility that would be the envy of many anthropologists, Damian, like Shakespeare’s Henry V, “can talk with every Tinker in his tongue”.

You don’t have to know the meaning of every last Cant word to find meaning in Damian’s pictures, however. It is not just every Tinker, but every watcher who will find himself addressed. The imagery of the family is universal, of man and woman, wife and husband, parent and child. The works of Damian and Delaine constantly quote from each other, take note of and respond to each other. They are not a joint artist, but the watchers find themselves the privileged observers of an ever-deepening relationship. You don’t need to know the details of their son’s achievements to see the sometimes perplexed but always committed development of the dialogue between father and son. The faces of the characters in this family drama are embedded in the clothes and limbs and flowing hair of the other characters, sometimes loving, sometimes angry, sometimes quizzical, always intimate, and always connected to their heritage by a myriad of peripheral details. Exhibition by exhibition, the images broaden their scope and strike deeper and harder. In the end, don’t look at these pictures for what they tell you about Damian and his family; look at them for what they will tell you about yourself.

Thomas Acton

Damian and Delaine Le Bas
photo: Tim Walker