Cosima Scales ‘Lantern Focus’

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.

Cosima Scales, 2026

Cosima Scales is a Brisbane-based artist whose practice engages deeply with traditions of observational painting, expanding these through an emphasis on gestural mark making and the nuanced interplay between perception and painterly expression. Her work encompasses both still life and landscape painting, grounded in a process of sustained and attentive observation. This approach often involves the careful arrangement of objects within the studio environment, which are studied over time, as well as the use of reference photographs that allow for a distillation of sensory impressions into compositional form.

Cosima’s paintings are characterised by a fluidity of mark and a sensitivity to the shifting qualities of light, atmosphere, and spatial relationships. She negotiates a dynamic tension between representation and abstraction, using expressive brushwork to evoke the vitality of the observed subject while simultaneously acknowledging the materiality and immediacy of paint. This oscillation invites a consideration of the ways in which looking, remembering, and making converge in the act of painting.

Since completing a Master of Visual Art by research in 2018, Cosima has participated in a range of solo and group exhibitions across Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Her work is informed by a lineage of Australian and international painters who have approached observation as an active, interpretive process—one that is as much about translating experience as it is about depicting the visible world. Through her practice, she continues to explore the capacity of painting to register time, place, and the subtleties of lived experience.

Cosima completed a Master of Visual Art (research) in 2018 at the Queensland College of Art, following a BFA Honours (First Class) at QCA and a BFA at the National Art School, Sydney. She was a finalist in the 2020 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and presented a 2025 solo exhibition, Personal Cinema, at the New England Regional Art Museum.