Lara Merrett is a respected abstract painter who has staged more than 30 solo exhibitions in Australia since the late 1990s with Jan Murphy and Karen Woodbury, among others. Merrett’s latest, By my side, walking her first solo with Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney will bring together painting and installation with her community-focussed environmental activism. Over the project’s two-year development period coinciding with Covid lockdowns, Merrett was primarily based at her property in North Bendalong on the NSW south coast, later completing the work for exhibition at her inner-west Sydney studio. Down south, Merrett had been actively involved in steering local forest saving protest actions involving many of her contemporary artist peers.

Forest protest histories commingled with her own personal experiences of the landscape sparked the idea for By my side, walking. Merrett has enlisted design collective Cave Urban to create a large structure made from four-meter branches to greet the viewer as they enter the voluminous gallery. Using the high gallery ceilings as an opportunity, the structure will act as a threshold abounding with references to what protest collectives taking over forests build to protect the landscape. Having first worked with Cave Urban in 2019, Merrett wants the structure to appear imposing yet ephemeral. “It’s about being resourceful with limited materials,” she says.

Other installation elements in By my side, walking include a bench made from rosewood, now extinct in the area. “I don’t think it’s a concept that people think about, that there are certain trees that don’t grow here anymore,” she says. Merrett will also include a suspended sculptural work referencing a treesit protest, whimsically using sturdy hardware materials to ceiling-hoist a reused painting frame as a seat. On closer inspection, her own artist history surfaces due to a worn adhesive registration label peeling from the stretcher, indicating her earliest dealer representation with the long defunct Kaliman Gallery, Sydney.

Merrett’s work looks for immersion, deftly blurring the lines demarcating the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. “My aim is to look for different ways of seeing and participating, new ways to bring people into the painting,” she says, nodding to Paint Me In, her Bella Room commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in 2018. Merrett says “a feeling of being held by painting” was enacted as viewers climbed into the work.

The formation of collective action as a fundamental tenet of activism drives her desire to give audiences new access points to politics through abstraction. Her sensitivity to the natural environment and its precarity in the face of extraction capitalism places poetics over didactic messaging. Forever in thrall of the special alchemy offered by materials, Merrett is restless in her experimentation and motivated to test the limits of her own established visual language as an abstract painter. Her new series of paintings connect this alchemy with an intuitive response to painting more and more in the landscape than the studio. Her paintings talk to place and landscape, “not as a landscape painter but as someone who lives and breathes and is affected by what goes on here.”

Large industrial drop sheets sourced from Bunnings are draped to the gallery walls as paint skins, providing a background for her new paintings. The drop sheets allow her to play with scale and colour in a way that extends beyond the stretcher and into the expanded field of painting, so to speak. “I get quite excited by different colour opportunities and moving colours around; I sometimes feel like the canvas isn’t big enough to fit everything in,” she says. Before they become a skin for the installation, the drop sheets undergo their own process of testing and transformation: dyed, dropped, and dragged beyond recognition. They become a way to dial up the sensory immersion while dressing the gallery architecture. She laughs, “I’m making a piece of clothing for the gallery; it gets to slip into it.”