Lara Merrett treats the studio as a cauldron of colour. In her latest body of paintings, Field work, the artist combines her social practice with a decades-long engagement with the material possibilities of colour field painting. Stemming from a series of cyanotype workshops with the local community in Bendalong, NSW, the works extend her interest in the amorphous potential of paint through washes of diluted acrylic harnessed within fields of deep prussian blue . . .
Starting off as messy and intuitive propositions, Merrett guides subtle layers of pigment as they meander, coalesce and form translucent skins across the painting’s surface. Like growing habitats of form, the paintings share an alchemic connection to the cyanotype process through their indexing of naturally-forming occurrences, lightness and contrasting figure-ground relationships. Plant structures appearing out of airy washes of leafy green and soft violet become petri dishes of liquefied, shimmering hue. The works appear both formless yet solid, functioning as slippery and dynamic reflections on the natural world filtered through the artist’s distinct language of abstraction.
– Mason Kimber, 2024
Lara Merrett, Field study 2, 2024, acrylic and ink on linen, 55 × 60cm. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery, Queensland
Read the exhibition essay by Mason Kimber here.
Jan Murphy Gallery
5 to 23 March 2024
Queensland
