About
i have spent my life looking at what people would rather not see
not because it is hidden
because it is visible
visible and ignored
my work begins there
to interrupt the arrangements we mistake for reality
to build rooms where looking away becomes more difficult
the rest belongs to the room.
The Practice
Leigh de Vries is a UK-based multidisciplinary artist working across text, sculpture, sound, video, and large-scale installation.
Her practice examines the ways contemporary environments shape and exert pressure on our inner lives. Rather than locating distress solely within the individual, de Vries considers it an environmental trace: evidence of the systems, cultures, and spaces through which a person is required to move.
At the centre of her work is Mental Environmentalism — the proposition that emotional life cannot be separated from the conditions in which it unfolds.
We do not blame the fish for struggling in polluted water.
De Vries constructs large-scale architectural environments in which experiences usually pushed into private life — grief, anger, shame, fear, and overwhelm — are made physical, public, and collective.
Visitors are invited to write directly onto the work. Monumental surfaces accumulate thousands of handwritten fragments: confessions, refusals, memories, questions, and things left unsaid. What begins as a single voice becomes a collective landscape.
The work does not ask the individual to heal more efficiently, think more positively, or endure more quietly. It turns the question outward:
What kind of environment produces this feeling?
Leigh de Vries has exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, and the United States, working with museums, galleries, and academic institutions.
Selected exhibitions
Selected Exhibitions
2026 How Are You, Installation, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, DE
2025 Feel Me, Installation, Trapholt Museum, Kolding, DK
2023 It’s OK, Large-scale typographic sculpture, Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK
2022 A Relational Space, Large-scale typographic sculpture, Clifton Park Museum, UK
2021 Reload Kindness, Typographic 3D mapping projection, Rotherham Minster, UK
2021 See Me, Virtual reality installation, BDD Foundation / OCD Action, UK
2018 Identity, Exhibition, Zebra One Gallery, London, UK
2017 Project: Body Dysmorphic Disorder, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA
2016 Love Is Louder, Exhibition, Coterie Gallery, Rotherham, UK
2015 Exposure: MyBrokenReality, Installation, UK
2015 Exposure, Exhibition, Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London, London, UK
2014 Strange, Video installation, South Place Gallery, London, UK
2014 Strange, Video installation, Red Gallery, London, UK
Selected Group Projects & Screenings
2018 Talkex17, Typographic projection, ROAR, Rotherham, UK
2017 DECADEnce (with Gozra Lozano), Exhibition, La Fresh Gallery, Madrid, ES
2016 Voyd (with Falk Klemm), Video installation, London, UK
2014 Coquetel de reinauguração (with Fernando Carpaneda), Galeria Almeida Prado, São Paulo, BR
2013 Art Takes Times Square (with Fernando Carpaneda), Public LED installation, Times Square, New York, USA
Awards & Grants
2023 Developing Your Creative Practice, Arts Council England, UK
2021 National Lottery Project Grant, Arts Council England, UK
2015 National Lottery Project Grant, Arts Council England, UK
Selected Lectures & Panels
2018 Breaking Boundaries for Museums, Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust / Arts Council England, UK
2016 Aesthetic Engagement and Youth Demographics, Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, UK
2015 The Cultural Prescription, Museum Development Yorkshire / Arts Council England, UK
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