Bio
Brisbane-based artist Leigh Schoenheimer maintains a contemporary multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting and sculpture. Her work - held in public and private collections across Australia - has been widely recognised for its conceptual depth and formal innovation. It features prominently in both editions of Creative Inquiry, the senior Visual Art textbook for Queensland (Cambridge University Press, 2019 and 2025).
Schoenheimer’s work has been shortlisted in major national awards for both painting and sculpture and she has received numerous art prizes and commendations. In 2022, she undertook an artist residency at the Nancy Fairfax Studio, Tweed Regional Gallery (NSW), continuing a long engagement with environmentally themed and conceptually layered work.
Her practice has been regularly showcased in solo exhibitions across Queensland’s regional public galleries. Most recently, An Unnatural History (2024) was presented at Redland Art Gallery, courtesy of the Redland Council. Earlier, her touring exhibition Iterate | Elaborate (Flying Arts Alliance, 2020–21) brought together key works from her acclaimed Perceive / Conceive series, first exhibited at Redland Art Gallery (2017), Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery (2018), and Onespace Gallery (2018).
Across these exhibitions, Schoenheimer has explored the shifting relationship between seeing and knowing, representation and interpretation. Her more recent, expanded landscape series, including RE_iterate and Still-Scapes, continues this inquiry - combining text, image, and environmental subject matter to prompt reflection on perception, language, and the natural world.
Artist's Statement
When people ask what kind of paintings I make, I usually say still life - but that’s really just the beginning. My still life paintings are not straightforward depictions of objects, they are entry points for the expression of ideas.
Through an 'expanded ' format, often presented as diptychs or triptychs, I explore the space between representation and interpretation, realism and abstraction, perception and conception.
In earlier series such as 'Ways of Seeing / Ways of Knowing ' and ' The Meaning of (Still) Life', these expanded still life works set up visual conversations that reference twentieth-century modernism while interrogating how meaning is constructed through images. Realistic still life forms are often juxtaposed with appropriated clip-art imagery or text, creating layered readings that invite reflection on how we see; what we think; and how we know.
Over the past few years, my practice has evolved to include expanded landscape paintings - works that extend these same conceptual concerns into the terrain of environmental imagery. My current series 'RE_iterate' explores the linguistic and visual possibilities of the prefix “re -,” meaning to do again, renew, or restore. Each painting features a “RE” word paired with a landscape depicting local native flora, drawing attention to themes of urban encroachment, environmental degradation, and regeneration. The chosen word functions as both title and poetic device - prompting questions, offering commentary, and suggesting potential remediations.
This new direction continues my long-standing interest in the natural world and environmental advocacy, seen previously in works such as 'Countdown', 'An Unnatural History', and 'Tweed Weeds.' Across these bodies of work, I have sought to fuse aesthetic investigation with ethical inquiry, using the visual language of painting to articulate both concern and hope for our shared environment.
In contrast to the conceptual layering of my paintings, my assemblage works - constructed from painted timber offcuts and found objects - celebrate material play and abstraction. Rooted in the aesthetics of Modernism, these compositions emerge through a process of intuitive arrangement and chance, uniting colour, rhythm, and structure. More recently, I have begun developing text-based assemblages connected to the 'RE_iterate' series, translating linguistic ideas from the paintings into sculptural form and exploring how words can inhabit space as both object and meaning.
Together, my paintings and assemblages form a dialogue between order and improvisation, image and idea. Whether exploring still life or landscape, I remain absorbed by the question of how art can illuminate the ways we see, think, and connect - with images, with meaning, and with the world itself.
