Bio
Brisbane-based artist Leigh Schoenheimer is a contemporary multidisciplinary practitioner working across painting and sculpture.
Over more than three decades, her work has been exhibited extensively in public and commercial galleries throughout Australia. It has been shortlisted in major national awards for both painting and sculpture, received numerous awards and commendations, including the 2026 Queen's Wharf Brisbane Art Prize ($20,000), and is held in public, corporate and private collections.
Schoenheimer has presented solo exhibitions throughout Queensland, including Iterate | Elaborate which toured throughout Qld's regional galleries with Flying Arts Alliance and, most recently, An Unnatural History at Redland Art Gallery in 2024. In 2022, she undertook an artist residency at the Nancy Fairfax Studio, Tweed Regional Gallery (NSW).
Her work features prominently in both editions of Creative Inquiry, the Queensland senior Visual Art textbook (Cambridge University Press, 2019 and 2025).
Artist's statement
I am interested in how varying re-presentations of a single subject can impact meaning and understanding.
Whether painting a still life or landscape, or creating a three-dimensional assemblage, I often bring together diverse styles and visual languages. By extending direct observation through abstraction, text, photographs, and found objects, my work presents, then re-presents, a given subject.
Through this ‘expanded’ format, I balance the formal challenges of painting a picture with a deeper inquiry into how those images transform meaning.
For more than 30 years, my practice has also engaged deeply with our relationship with the natural world. This environmental focus has increasingly taken centre stage, explored through these same expanded formats of image, text, and assemblage.
The question of what happens when we look at familiar things from different perspectives continues to intrigue me. Ultimately, art reshapes how we see, think, and establish meaning.
