The PUBlic Window: Alex Leigh

ALEX LEIGH: ‘Summer Reign

Alex Leigh is an artist based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. He creates assemblages with a magical realist approach to his surroundings. Leigh describes this as a ‘free-form archaeology’, exploring the structures and ideologies that give form to the material world. He graduated from the Slade BA 2018 specialising in sculpture and was a finalist for the Ingram collection’s Purchase Prize 2018. He has exhibited in towns and cities across the UK including London, Manchester and Wolverhampton and internationally in Helsinki, Finland.

Alex’s PUBlic window exhibition, ‘Summer Reign’, plays on the idea of a ‘Potemkin Village’. The sculpture rotates and will continuously follow rain readings so that it is always facing the last, heaviest, report of rain in the country.

“With us the sunshine is welcome and it is not usually from it’s heat that we seek shelter, but from wind and rain and cold. The southern European sweltering in the sunlight imagined Hell was hot. The Scandinavian with frost-bitten fingers imagined it was all snow and ice and darkness. The people of Britain might well have fashioned for themselves a hell of wind and rain and mud…except that, strangely enough, they were always suffering from unexpected droughts.”

Stephen Bone British Weather (1946)

See Alex’s website www.alex-leigh.com or email: info@republicgallery.co.uk