I began this exhibition intending to paint the interior of my parents’ house. I was drawn to rooms that interlock through windows, skylights, and an atrium full of plants. But over the course of visits to their place, I found myself drawn to smaller things, like a collection of paper daisies and the illuminated corner of a rug.

I noticed a parallel between my fascination with the texture of ordinary things, which I explore through painting, and the collections of objects that dot the family home. I brought subjects from my own home life into conversation with them. Textured glass, colourful fabric, backyard flowers and crinkled bedsheets.

The title of the exhibition nods to ‘lantern consciousness’, a term used by psychologist Alison Gopnik to describe the way in which small children interact with the world. It’s a form of attention that casts an undiscriminating glow over what it encounters, unaffected by hierarchies of importance that sharpen perception into adulthood. I find it a beautiful description that makes me think of observational painting, which can reveal ordinary things to be extraordinary through the attention given to them.

This exhibition came about through my attempts at a similar kind of curious attention, paying mind to the visual and sensory information of everyday moments and translating them into paint.