There are many myths and assumptions made about the gypsy community – from the belief the Romani language is dead (it isn’t) to tabloid fever about travellers setting up unauthorised encampments.

With her residency at Phoenix Brighton, Romany artist Delaine Le Bas is trying to open a conversation with visitors and tell the story of a people frequently stereotyped in society.

“It’s giving a place for people in history who haven’t suddenly turned up,” she says. “We have always been part of the landscape.

“The problem is most of the history about my community has been written from the outside looking in. A lot of my work, and other artists’ work from my community, is about trying to uncover our history and the skills people had.”

Local Name: Unknown... Gypsies? takes its name from a label accompanying Romany artefacts in a museum collection. At its centre are two replicas of a pair of glass and metal lanterns Le Bas discovered in Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, recreated by Hastings blacksmith Jake Bowers.

“They look like something made in India but they came from the New Forest,” says Le Bas, who is based in Worthing.

“The original glass was made from old bottles. There are a lot of things in museum collections across the country stored under different names, with labels coming off over time.”

The lanterns provide one example of gypsy skills passed down over the centuries and mirror Le Bas’s use of recycled materials in her own work.

“I use lots of stuff from car boot sales and things that people give me,” she says. “My community are masters at recycling and making things out of things that other people discard.

“Across Europe people are trying to live in different low-impact ways, but they never talk to my community, where there are lots of experts.”

The flipside of the way gypsies have been treated in the past 100 years is represented in the central feature of the exhibition.

Le Bas is recreating one of the compounds in The New Forest – established in the 1920s when gypsy families were prevented from camping in the woods as they had done for centuries.

“The compounds were about controlling people,” says Le Bas, whose family lived in Hampshire.

“The New Forest started to become very popular with other people as well. My community wasn’t allowed to do the things it had done before to maintain a sort of living. We were very restricted with what we could do.”

Visitors will be able to go into the recreated compound – the last of which was eventually pulled down by the New Forest Rural District Council in the 1960s after being declared unsafe and insanitary, with residents either placed in council housing or moved back on to the road.

Inside will be a mixture of installations and archive material relating to gypsy and traveller history.

“The installation is ongoing and will grow over time,” says Le Bas. “I’m providing a space for people to meet and have a conversation, as well as being able to talk to people about any negative opinions.

“It’s giving people the ability to view things in a different way.

“When I used to go into classrooms and do workshops, I would ask who went on holiday in a caravan and then ask what was wrong with doing that all the time? It’s talking about other ways of living.”

Le Bas – a graduate of Central Saint Martins College Of Art And Design in London and West Sussex College Of Art And Design – has taken work to the 2007 Venice Biennale, London’s Transition Gallery, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and Galerie Giti Nourbaksch in Berlin.

As well as this exhibition she has been working with Barby Asante and 198 Contemporary Arts And Learning on the ongoing project To Gypsyland, which moves around the country examining myths and ideas about the gypsy experience.

Le Bas will be working in the Phoenix Brighton exhibition from Friday, May 16, to Sunday, May 18, and on Friday, May 25.

And she will be joined by her son Damian, film-maker and editor of Travellers’ Times, who will be exploring the creative possibilities of costume and self-adornment in Be Yourself on Thursday, May 15, in the first of two special events connected to the exhibition.

A symposium about gypsy and outsider experience in Object Or Individual? is taking place from 1.30pm to 7.30pm on Saturday, May 24, featuring appearances from John Maizels of Raw Vision magazine, Dr Louise Purbrick from the University of Brighton and art therapist Tony Gammidge.

  • Local Name: Unknown... Gypsies? is at Phoenix Brighton, Waterloo Place, Brighton, from Saturday, April 26, to Sunday, June 15. Open Wednesday to Sunday 11am to 5pm, late opening until 9pm on Friday, May 16, and Saturday, May 17, free. For more information, visit phoenixbrighton.org