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, 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
What happens to meaning when we shift the way we represent something?
This question sits at the heart of my practice.
Whether I am painting a still life, a landscape or constructing an assemblage, I am interested in what happens when the same subject is translated into different visual languages. Working in expanded formats, I often present multiple responses to a single subject within one work, bringing together observation, abstraction, text, appropriated illustrations and assemblage. Rather than seeking a single interpretation, I invite viewers to move between different ways of seeing and to consider how meaning is shaped by the language through which it is communicated.
In recent years, this ongoing investigation has become inseparable from another long-standing concern, one that has informed my work for more than three decades: our relationship with the natural world. Environmental themes now inhabit the same expanded visual language as my still life paintings, where aesthetic enquiry and ecological reflection inform one another.
Whether working in paint or three dimensions, I remain fascinated by the endless possibilities that emerge when familiar subjects are re-imagined, and by art's capacity to make us look and think again.
