With an instinctive meshing together of material and feel, Mark Merrikin’s paintings capture everyday connections between friends and family. This might feel like a well-trod path, but there is an unusual tenderness and direct gesture in the work. Figures feel lovingly embraced by a wild meshing of patterns and shifting surfaces. A colour link to the Fauvist modernists is there but then knocked back by accretions of cement and spray paint. Built up grainy areas bring the outside in to these images, landing the work in an urban present.
Merrikin uses direct methods to get started. Sketches are made from personal photographs and remembered conversations. An old-style overhead projector helps to get the drawings up onto the surface. This is where changes take place, swapping up images, adding and overlaying the composition while moving across the surface with paint and pencil and spray paint.
In parallel with the paintings, the artist presents casual sculptural objects in the same materials, incidental in their presentation but resilient in their physical weight. In these tender and confessional sculptures, portrait and dialogue find a foothold in what feels like a broken off piece of pavement. The objects further compress the space between urban exterior and the homestyle intimacy of the paintings. Merrikin works in an instinctive and direct way, with an intent to fold us in on moments of personal exchange.
Mark Merrikin is an emerging artist from Woolgoolga on the NSW mid-north coast. He is now based in Port Kembla, having graduated from the University of Wollongong. The Egg & Dart is excited to present the artist’s first show at the gallery.
- Melody Willis
