Leigh Schoenheimer – Apprehendsion

Apprehendsion is an exhibition of recent multi-panelled paintings by Leigh Schoenheimer that are based on her research into flora and fauna of south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales, including elements that are both endangered and endemic, native and invasive. These bring together the artist’s longstanding interest in painting as a way of seeing – an interplay of image and idea explored through iterations of realism, abstraction and text – with her unease about the impact of colonisation on the local natural environment. Schoenheimer’s portmanteau, ‘apprehendsion’, encapsulates these dual concerns and their relationship: a method used to apprehend, in the form of painting as a mode of perception and understanding, is used to express apprehension, in the form of ecologically-minded anxiety.

Apprehendsion includes work from two of Schoenheimer’s existing series, The Meaning of (Still) Life: An Unnatural History (2021-2022) and Still-Scapes: Tweed Weeds (2022).”