Kid Contemporary

For Sydney Contemporary 2024, artist Lara Merrett presented an immersive installation The Blue Room which invited participants to bring along a favourite pocket size flower, twig, leaf or rock from their garden or neighbourhood and turn it into a blue print using the cyanotype process. Participants can make a couple of prints and choose one to take home.

About The Artist 

Lara Merrett’s practice interrogates the relationship between painting and its surrounding architecture with site-specific work that invites us to enter and navigate its folds. Merrett’s larger scale commissioned work has involved public participation through touch, movement, cuttings, and its relationship to the built environment. Her simultaneous agility, amplification and softening of the rigid confines of canvas and gallery, both complicate and honor painterly traditions. Merrett works expand the field of traditional painting; working often on a large scale, the artist layers and pours water-based materials onto textile surfaces, the outcomes of which are impossible to anticipate. For Merrett writes, “It’s like magic when the unexpected starts to happen. I love it – it’s completely intoxicating. Each work has its own personality and therefore takes its own time.” Such alchemy might last days, weeks or perhaps months. In each case, the artist and works are always driven in part by their material exigencies but so too by their conceptual sources drawn from literature, nature, community and activism. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Lara Merrett currently lives and works between Sydney and Bendalong, New South Wales. She studied painting abroad at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain, before completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales and graduating with a Master of Art (Painting).