Artist Leigh de Vries explores identity, the perception and representation of mental health, and our inner emotional lives in contemporary culture. She uses a range of media, including sculpture, photography, text, video, and sound, to create interactive installations that engage the audience and encourage dialogue around mental health and taboo emotions.

de Vries has developed two areas of practise: “short term projects”, meaning individual or sterilised visual artworks of limited temporality; and “long term projects” or durational, participatory artworks that evolve over many years. While short term projects are noted for their knife sharp acuity to address what she calls “social time-specificity”, long-term projects seek to remove the boundaries between art and life.

Her current focus is on creating works of “arte util” or useful art-artworks that serve a practical function in society and exist within “real” situations outsides the confines of the art world and its accepted systems of production, distribution and consumption.