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Lara Merrett: Swimming in time
Landlocked in Central Victoria, lecturer and writer Amelia Wallin immerses herself in the watery landscape, lifestyle and art work of Lara Merrett over the course of several weeks.
By Amelia Wallin
May 15 — When Lara Merrett and I speak, she is in her studio on Gadigal land, and I am at home in Djarra, central Victoria. Merrett speaks of her ties to Jerrinja land, saltwater country, where she lives and makes projects and swims in the ocean every Friday, depending on the conditions. You learn to read the water, she explains to me, to negotiate the changes in current and conditions before deciding whether to swim. This experience of saltwater feels far flung from the central Victorian bushlands where I have recently moved. The largest body of water close to me is a reservoir, the current water temperature hovers around 8 degrees. Later I gingerly shop for wetsuits online wondering if I, too, can commit to swimming weekly in a body of water.
It is these weekly encounters with the watery world that inspire Merrett’s paintings, along with the Country she encounters on her bushwalks. She has deep roots in this community, whereas I am a relative newcomer to the town in which I now find myself. But both regions, like so many coastal and inland towns, share experiences of bushfires and floods, ecological disasters occurring with more frequency. Climate activism is a large part of Merrett’s life, from planting inner city forests, to leading workshops with local communities.
May 22 — I fall asleep listening to Tim Winton’s audio book of Blueback, which Merrett tells me she is reading to her ten year old child, a story about ocean conservation and friendship between a human boy and the more-than human coastal world he inhabits. I dream watery dreams of being a strong swimmer, of being at home in the water. We’re often reminded that our bodies are 60% water, but, just as astounding, I am reminded that Earth is more than 70% water. We land-dwellers are the minority on a watery planet. No wonder being in water feels like trespassing. Being in water offers glimpses into another world that exists in harmony without human animals, where we are unwelcome intruders.
May 28 — A friend once remarked how in her household, many bad moods had been remedied by watercolour paints. The transformative effect of turning crumbly pigment into sweeping arcs of color transfixes and soothes my children as well. We paint one afternoon as it rains and the glass jar muddies from blue to brown to purple. As the jar inevitably gets tripped over I am reminded of Merrett’s process in the studio. Using inks and vast quantities of water, sometimes a broom, Merrett shifts and manipulates her watery colours across the canvases. Working on a horizontal plane, gravity guides the colours into tributaries.
In Merrett’s paintings, often a singular colour dominates before merging together with other colours in a chorus of unity. I feel pulled inside this colourscape, and could easily lose myself in this negotiation of pigments. These paintings provide a sense of transportation, a chance to be held within their watery surfaces. Hazy and fluid, they evoke memories of touch and smell, of being in water or in nature. Using a colour palette drawn directly through Merrett’s experiences in the natural world, from her weekly ocean swims to regular bushwalks, this sense of immersion is deliberate.
Merrett’s paintings urge a haptic encounter, rather than only ocular. For Merrett, touch has frequently been a tool through which audiences are invited to encounter her work. In the past she has created site specific installations where the audience is invited to interact with her paintings. In an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, several of Merrett’s paintings hung loose in arcs, suspended from the ceiling, in which you could sit or lie. In another installation at Carriageworks, audiences were invited to navigate her paintings with scissors, taking home whichever fragment they had snipped off.
We like to imagine our skins are membranes or barriers, between our watery bodies and the watery body of the planet, but as academic and hydrofeminist Astrida Neimanis argues, this impermeability is an illusion.
June 10 — In Merrett’s most recent body of work, exhibited at Sullivan+Strumpf in Melbourne, touch is communicated in the relation between pigment and canvas. The scale is slightly larger than one person, which sustains the feeling of being with a seascape or landscape. Borders of wooden frames are drawn around the once saturated canvases, creating a tension between the hazy images and the taught fabric. The ink is applied thinly enough that the texture of the rough cotton shows through. The staining of the ink reads like an impression, similar to the tide leaving its trace along a shoreline. It's possible to see where the colours pooled, and the ink ebbed. The crinkle and folds of the fabric run like veins through the painting and in some places thick seams interrupt the fields of colour, drawing attention to the function of the fabric as a membrane.
We like to imagine our skins are membranes or barriers, between our watery bodies and the watery body of the planet, but as academic and hydrofeminist Astrida Neimanis argues, this impermeability is an illusion. Neimanis reminds us that “we perspire, urinate, ingest, ejaculate, menstruate, lactate, breathe, cry. We take in the world, selectively, and send it flooding back out again.”
ink and acrylic on cloth and linen, 220 x 150 cm
June 15 — As I write this, one son stands and splashes at the sink, delighted by the warm water and bubbles, and the other sits next to me, close enough that the soundtrack of the Octonauts washes over me, detailing the aquatic adventures of a band of animal explorers. The Octonauts travel around in specialised submarines and I find myself longing for a similar experience of submersion. To slip under sea, to find the quietness that water offers. What other experiences offer the same feeling of submersion? A bath, an afternoon painting with watercolours. A plunge, a dip, a bucket of water-based paint tipped upside down on canvas on the floor, a moment standing in front of a painting. Duration is irrelevant, submersion can occur in an instant. And there you stand, saturated in colour. What surfaces in the work of Merrett is a sense of reverie, of quiet study and active participation.
LARA MERRETT, TISSU TISSUE
20 JULY – 12 AUGUST, 2023
SULLIVAN+STRUMPF NAARM/MELBOURNE
