Lara Merrett: By my side, walking

Contemporary artist Lara Merrett and Curator and Executive Director, Artspace, Alexie Glass-Kantor met more than 25 years ago. Alexie first wrote about Lara’s practice in 1998 and the two have been both friends and peers ever since. This momentary extract comes from an ongoing conversation between the pair, now spanning more than a quarter of a century, here focusing on Merrett’s upcoming exhibition By my side, walking at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.

Interview with Alexie Glass-Kantor

Alexie Glass-Kantor (AGK) / Lara, your practice has been built around a conversation with colour and a deep and unabating interest in how its direct affect and impact can create different forms of encounter, consciousness or awareness in audiences. Colour informs both the two-dimensional and expanded forms of your paintings, including the sculptural incursions that are a form of embodiment, of architecture in colour, and that invite participation. In the last five years your work has really undergone a transformation and is moving in new directions. So how do we find ourselves here today in beautiful Bendalong, on Yuin Country?

Lara Merrett (LM) / In the last five years my painting has certainly slipped off the stretched canvas and I have wanted to explore what the possibilities of painting were, for me. For it to become three dimensional, immersive and to engage with different architectures and possibilities of scale. It has also become a kind of sanctuary; I like being swallowed up by the work. That is the state that I find the most rewarding in creating and making. It might explain why there is such scale to the work lately. I’m also really interested in it overtaking spaces.

Lara Merrett, Makeshift moment underground (detail), 2022, ink and acrylic on sheer 100% cotton canvas and cedar stretcher 122 x 153 cm

Photo: Jek Maurer

AGK / It’s an expanded encounter with the colour field. And the way you approach this encounter isn’t a passive form of action. Abstraction actually comes out of a lineage of social, cultural and political responses and is a radical way of thinking. Colour can be a radical form for encounter.

LM / For me, it's colour as a language, I like to tap into where colour can take you to. As much as hearing the line of a song or the smell of something, I think the power of colour is on equal footing with those senses. So, I'm pushing that forward and taking it to the extreme... I want to know about every kind of yellow there is! The way I get there is not a logical process, it's through introducing chance, experimentation and thinking about where and when I make something. In my current works, I'm looking for the experience of being connected to nature and so here we are in Bendalong.

I like to tap into where colour can take you to. As much as hearing the line of a song or the smell of something, I think the power of colour is on equal footing with those senses.

Lara Merrett, Sitting out in the hours (detail), 2022, ink and acrylic on sheer 100% cotton canvas and cedar stretcher 150 x 225 cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

AGK / I remember a beautiful moment the last time I was here with you. Your paintings were lying directly on the earth and September sun was streaming in as you were sweeping off fallen leaves from the surrounding trees. Having known you for a long time, as you were standing there barefoot on the canvas, I could see that there was a shift happening in you and your relationship to your work.

LM / At that time, maybe due to home-schooling and being indoors all the time, there was just this hunger to be outside in the landscape. The 2020 bushfires had just hit, and everything around me was really charred and black. Everybody in the area was on the lookout for any wildlife that might come back. I felt like if I wasn't outside, I wasn't doing my job, which was to sight birds and to report. I was also running up the road, where we had these little bush feeding stations, because we wanted the kangaroos, goannas, the greater gliders, and all the animals to come to feed and breed.

So, there's always been a very practical approach to my work, if I'm outside doing this it's not just making, I'm doing other things. I needed to be watching, helping things. That was my role.

Lara Merrett: By my side, walking, video produced by Sullivan+Strumpf.

Videography: David Barker, ArtVid

AGK / It’s so important that By my side, walking isn't about leading from the front or coming up the back, but creating opportunities to walk together, to be together, to cross thresholds together. At the entrance of Sullivan+Strumpf there is a beautiful large-scale installation-as-threshold. When visitors come into the gallery they walk under and through this structure. They decide to be complicit and engaged with the space, crossing into an environment of participation. There are many important lineages you are drawing from here in addition to the formalist concerns of colour field abstraction.

LM / We have spoken about transformation before. A big part of the new work is this transparency I created in the canvas, letting both light into the work, and letting audiences into them too. Looking beyond the canvas and seeing the structure beyond.

In my research for this show, I was looking to powerful structures and landscapes of transformational change. From protestors who have saved old growth forest creating the Conjola National Park, or helping local fauna feed and breed post-bushfires, they were all everyday actions by everyday people. The community of which I am part. The structures that support or result from these actions are really interesting for me.

Lara Merrett, Running on the spot (detail), 2022, ink and acrylic on sheer 100% cotton canvas and cedar stretcher 122 x 153 cm

Photo: Jek Maurer

One structure I came across in that research was the ‘tree-sit’. I mean, even just the words tree-sit, spark great associations for me. That to save a tree you must sit with it which implies time, collaboration and so much more than the structure itself. So, for the exhibition, I found a fantastic handbook that was made in the 90s. And basically, I think I've got it here, it's called The Earth First Direct Action Manual. I love it, it's like a ‘bible’ or manual of non-violent direct action. It’s basically for people who forest protest. It's a very practical guide, it's got how to tie knots, how to tree-sit. On one page, I saw a wonderful DIY on how to make a tree-sit platform which, interestingly for me, was the same scale as one of my paintings. So, I had this idea of having my stretched painting mimic this strategy. I love the idea that a painting, actually putting it in a forest in this way, could save a tree.

So, the platform becomes a painting and I have flipped it so that you can view the painting sitting down, or if you were lying on your back on the gallery floor and looking straight up. We're asked to engage in a different way then, which might make us think about connecting to the outside. Or bringing that connection inside. The platform is held up by a pulley and rope to a tree above, and then you've got this very simple but very effective way for a person to sit in a tree and mind it.

Lara Merrett, High on a hill (detail), 2022, ink and acrylic on sheer 100% cotton canvas and cedar stretcher 122 x 153 cm

Photo: Jek Maurer

I have had a real curiosity, since working out in the elements, with the weather and time, to almost squeeze the colour out of what's already around me and doing that mindfully. So, I've been working with ochres from the Clay Cliffs of Washerwoman's Beach in consultation and collaboration with Yuin elders like Uncle Paul Jrumpinjinbah McCloud, who will work with me in creating a community workshop looking at the land, recuperating natural pigments which helps regenerate the landscape.

Washerwoman's Beach is only 500 metres from here, it’s really on my doorstep. There's just so much colour in the landscape, literally, from these incredible soft blushing pinks to reds and oranges. For a painter to come across this and realise there are histories here, of material uses across time, particularly in Yuin and other Indigenous histories of the area as well. It's a sacred material. Opening up conversation about learning how, and whether we can, work with these respectfully and with permissions has been wonderful and key in the selection of material and how it has been used. I have also been working with Joanna Fowles on the uses of natural dyes and Diego Bonetto on generative weeding practices postbushfires.

Lara Merrett, Standing still, 2022, ink and acrylic on sheer 100% cotton canvas and cedar stretcher 122 x 153 cm

Photo: Jek Maurer

AGK / What is so pertinent is that the workshops may not necessarily find direct form in the exhibition, but they are the foundational structure of By my side, walking. Interpersonal relationships and community are the scaffold, the provisional architecture that you are building. People need to come together to form and create, activate and resist – be it policies or interventions that undermine land, Country and care, or sustainability and its inherent capacity for resilience. Your practice is about investing in those relationships over the long term, not just at times of crisis but for healing too.

There is a beautiful book by Lori Waxman called Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus, all about how walking is self-determination: you decide the direction you go in, what you encounter, how long you spend with something and when to walk away.

I love that this exhibition is an invitation for audiences to walk in through this threshold, into a space where material forms, which have existed in a state of flux and transformation, have found this propositional form through you. A proposition for the next act in the transformation of your practice too.

LM / Absolutely, I'm inviting collaborators and audiences to come with me in this process, and this space is open to everyone. Relationships need that space given over to them, it needs to be in the spirit of generosity, I feel, because that's what I've been given through my experiences, and I wouldn't have the work I have without having all these people by my side, walking.

EXHIBITION: LARA MERRETT, BY MY SIDE, WALKING, 20 OCT – 12 NOV 2022, S+S SYDNEY

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