The landscape of ‘Anywhere But Here’ is poisoned. As if to root ourselves here in this cold concrete laden cuboid is inevitably a negative experience. There is an overbearing mood here - perpetual longing, dissatisfaction with the here and now, climbing that well known mountain for the promised ‘right’ place. Wouldn't we all rather be somewhere else?

‘Anywhere but Here’ aims to address this architecture of escape, where worry hangs in the air as we all gasp for an actually good moment to come. Things pile up in the back room, forming meagre attempts at stability. Our shared world of apathy form into scaffolds for the display of Alex Leigh’s ever knotted body of mechanisms.

A layer of poison is found within all landscapes. A sense of place can never be completely ideal - virtuosity is often the blind position of utopias. As Alex Leigh’s audience, is it about navigating the space with distaste, or acceptance? I personally celebrate the acknowledgement that not everything is there to heal. I’m exhausted; numb to the experience of countless visual ASMR iterations that that try to better my day. It’s a suffocating form of deflection. Its own power structure; the foundations and facade are built upon concealment.

Alex Leigh uses the opportunity of his first solo show to look introspectively. The subtle ways our ‘inscapes’ makes worlds - how the interior forms the exterior (and not the other way round). An illustration from Thomas Moore’s Utopia is projected onto an ASICS jacket as it waves on a simulacrum wind, this is an enduring nightmare for us all. When poisoned, the worst thing is to resist, it’s better to understand - to decode.

Hanging in the air a large-scale drawing of hands overshadows. Sweaty hands, tied finger by finger, establishing a reinforced wall of deflection. Stress forms the landscape of this image. Barbara Hepworth used to pour bronzes after her hands, Henry Moore scratched etchings for his. The time worn grips and palms seduced one another to make narrative. These were hands that made fields and mountains, as if without them there are no ‘tools’ to address universal beauty. Forever we now endure their legacies. For Alex Leigh, hands are signs not for looking outward, but inward.

What happens next is uncertain, unknowable. In the space of ‘Anywhere but Here’, hands are more like piles of fingers, fingers that are used for pointing, for swiping. The fingers form a lattice to conceal, to deflect. It’s hard to know who owns these hands, it’s easier to imagine, some randomer with the sour body language of somebody who likes to think they're speaking from a point of authority. For me, I just think they’re simply unsure.

In the end - fingers are just another thing in the continual pile up, another material constituting an archaeological stratum. Fingers become structures, scaffolds have faces. We can’t imagine this place could have been built by anyone with the certainty of a soundbite policy maker, or by the re-developers of neglect. Trying to get a panorama of this landscape is disorientating, its familiar yet brings me a relentless sense of dread. ‘Anywhere but Here’ imagines at varying heights the architecture for escape, uncertainty and pain. Alex Leigh’s foundations are built on acceptance.