Lara Merrett, Seventeen Days
Lara Merrett
Seventeen Days
Sumer
3 Waihirere Lane
Tauranga 3110
Aotearoa (New Zealand)
18 November – 18 December 2021
The exhibition’s title draws reference to a forest blockade that took place in 1996. An action that brought together 200 people from the local Bendalong Manyana community, camping on the land for 17 days to prevent the forest from being turned into Sydney’s “mega tip”. The success of the protest resulted in the land being preserved, subsequently becoming Conjola National Park. This community, Bendalong Manyana on Yuin Country in regional New South Wales, is where Merrett now resides, and where the works of this exhibition were made. Yet this title is not merely congratulatory, as the community continue to fight to save local bushland from further development; specifically a parcel of unburnt forest, made more precious by the 2019-2020 summer bushfires, which saw an unprecedented area of forest burnt across Australia’s eastern seaboard.
These paintings were produced in the artist’s outdoor studio—open to the elements, encouraging the rain, wind and sun to become an integral part of their making. Merrett works within an expanded field of painting, with a deep understanding as to the interplay of colour and surface, making works ranging in scale from the intimate to the monumental. Within her constructed colour fields, the artist imagines all the ‘geographies of space, atmosphere and physicality’. Layering and pouring of paint, dye and water, her process is one involving chance, whose results are never fully anticipated, yet the artist embraces them as both integral and transformative within the work. Merrett’s simultaneous agility, amplification and softening of the rigid confines of canvas both honour and expand painterly traditions, with specific reference women’s practices and work.
This series of paintings, unstretched and banner-like, represent a new development in Merrett’s practice. For while the use of immersive inks and dyes together with opaque paints, and multifaceted sewn canvases, are aspects seen in previous work, the artist has chosen to move away from presenting her work as traditional stretched canvases. In doing so the works’ materiality become more apparent. They also connect more clearly with her past installation and social sculpture works, and activism.
— Gallery exhibition text
Lara Merrett, I’ll Stay Here, 2021, acrylic and ink on canvas, 174 x 247 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sumer
Lara Merrett, The Signs, 2021, acrylic and ink on sewn canvas, 195 x 164 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sumer
Lara Merrett, Slowly, Slowly, 2021, acrylic and ink on canvas, 151 x 144 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sumer
Lara Merrett, Returnings, 2021, acrylic and ink on canvas, 150 x 144 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sumer
Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Underworld napping, 2021, acrylic and ink on unstretched canvas, 150 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sumer
Lara Merrett, Take me to the river, 2021, acrylic and ink on sewn canvas, 147 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sumer
Lara Merrett, Waiting for the Sun, 2021, acrylic and ink on canvas, 155 x 147 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sumer
Lara Merrett, Seventeen Days. Installation view, Sumer, November 2021