Finn Beales, Meadow Arts, Delaine Le Bas

Cissbury Ring is one of the oldest earthworks in Britain, a Neolithic flint mine turned Iron Age hillfort, a place where the land holds thousands of years of unnamed lives. On International Roma Day, I photographed Romany artist Delaine Le Bas here. She arrived carrying her work: hand-painted veils, texts in neon yellow and orange, a silver coat that caught the last of the evening light.

Delaine is a Turner Prize-nominated artist. Some of Le Bas’ ideas draw on her familial heritage of British Gypsy, Romani, Roma and Traveller People — cultures that have oten existed at the edge of the frame, misrepresented or made invisible by the societies they moved through.

In making these photographs here, above the valley where her grandparents lived, I wanted to document Delaine’s return to this ancient ground — to her heritage, her engagement with myth and memory, and the landscape that shaped her.