Lucy and Me

Dogs “see” the world through their noses. The olfactory centre of the canine brain is said to be more sensitive than that of humans. Whenever Dawn-Joy Leong takes her dog Lucy Like-a-Charm for a walk, “she’ll be sniffing every little thing and, being the paranoid ‘mum’ that I am about her picking up dirty things, I’m always looking at what she’s looking at”.

But unlike other dog owners, the artist-researcher is a little bit more interested in the details because, you see, she is autistic—she didn’t realise this until she was in her early 40s—and “the autistic brain looks at the details and takes in all the patterns before looking from