Description: Leigh de Vries is a visual artist and mental health advocate dedicated to raising awareness about Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). In her artwork, she explores her lived experience as someone living with BDD and provides support to those affected by this mental illness.
By breaking away from the notion that expressing vulnerable emotions, especially those considered taboo is wrong, we can create an atmosphere that encourages growth. What if we approached mental health as a societal issue instead of an individual responsibility?
Leigh 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.
de Vries’s 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.