Leigh de Vries has developed two areas of practice: “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.