What’s Hidden, Leigha Stiles
Stills from a video performance showing a figure wearing a sculptural garment constructed from dozens of translucent orange prescription pill bottles linked together into a dress-like form. Beneath the bottle structure, the performer wears a brightly coloured geometric-patterned dress, yellow high-heeled shoes, and a multicoloured face covering that wraps across the eyes, nose, mouth, and neck, partially obscuring their identity. The pill bottle garment extends outward in flexible, grid-like panels that sway with the body's movement. Close-up frames reveal the layered fabric mask and the individual prescription bottles, some with visible pharmacy labels, emphasizing the repetitive modular construction of the wearable sculpture. Set against a plain white studio backdrop, the work explores the relationship between the body, identity, medicine, and material culture through movement and performance.
Title: What’s Hidden
Artist: Leigha Stiles
Date: 2024
Medium/Materials: Single channel HD video
Dimensions: Video 00:00:57
Form/Genre: Performance art; Video
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Mental illness; Disability; Resilience; Mental health
Artist Statement:
Leigha Stiles draws from lived experience to examine how mental health conditions shape perception, movement, and identity. The body functions as both medium and site of inquiry. Through constructed garments and sculptural forms worn during performance, she materializes psychological weight, containment, and fragmentation. These works often oscillate between protection and exposure, confronting the tension between what is privately experienced and publicly visible.
Stiles’ work seeks to foster dialogue around mental health and the complexity of invisible conditions. Rather than positioning disability as deficit, her practice reframes it as a lived, nuanced reality that resists simplification. Through interdisciplinary approaches, she invites audiences to consider how internal struggles are navigated within private and public spaces.
Cultural Context / Story Behind the Work:
This work is a series of installations Stiles is creating regarding her mental health journey. Starting with childhood grief, then an episode of psychosis and most recently being diagnosed with epilepsy.
Rights for this Image:
This digital image is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You are free to share it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the artist.
Learn More:
@artbystiles