Q&A with artist Leila Heinrich

The work of 2019’s Year 12 students from across the NT was scheduled to exhibit at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Exit Art this month. We were lucky enough to sneak a peek before galleries were closed and caught up with April’s cover artist, 18-year-old Leila Heinrich, for a chat.

Was art always something you wanted to get in to?
I guess I was always a creative kid. I got into origami when I was 14 as a form of meditation and fell in love with the practice.

Your work appears on the cover of this month’s edition – can you tell us a bit about it?
So that was part of my Year 12 Arts Project – our school wanted us to enter them into MAGNT. It’s always great to get that recognition and it was a lovely feeling when I found out it’d been selected.

That one I called Pledge of Hope, and it’s one part of a three-tree set. I’ve done the calculations – there’s 500 pieces of individual paper cranes and each one took me about two minutes. Including the wire work and gluing, it’s over 24 hours. That’s a lot of TV seasons on Netflix!

What inspired your work?
It’s based on a thing called an enneagram, which is a weird niche thing on the ideas of people as the perfectionist, the helper and the achiever. Those are types one to three, and then there are three separate types of the nine overall types. In a way, it’s about the beauty we see as humans and the way we look at the world.

Do you have a favourite artist or a particular style of art that you like?
Not really. I did look at different artists as part of my study, but I wasn’t looking to emulate different artists, I was trying to get my own ideas into my work.

What are your plans for the future? Do they involve art?
I’m currently at SA Uni doing a Bachelor of Journalism and a Bachelors of Arts. I’m hoping to have something to do with the creative side of things – I’m always creating things at home and in my own time. Art is mainly how I keep sense of everything.