Looking to the margins of attention, David Merritt reanimates artefacts of the everyday in assemblages that illustrate both the refinement and exhausted use of their individual components, combining with their material precursor in hybrid, dynamic forms. Reclaimed surfaces—paper, stone, lead—play host to exquisitely tenuous images that, rather than emerging from, instead, inhabit a surface.

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The new work develops from an ongoing perceptual exercise begun over seven years ago. Focusing on the margins of attention, this exercise has resulted in an open-ended series of pencil and watercolour renderings called ‘notices’.  Illustrated objectively, from memory, and currently exceeding over 20,000 in number, I have come to see these renderings as comprising a kind of itinerant map of the micro-events that form the ground of the everyday.

The new project sets out to reanimate the terrain of the notices without directly reproducing them. This project is decidedly diverse in means, consisting of video, sculpture, and works on paper and stone.  In approach, these works alternate between image and abstraction. The images trace the entanglements of artefacts and organisms--particularly as they reflect forces of divergence or dispersal, while the persisting abstract figure in the work is that of the circle. Traditionally an emblem of the cosmological or cyclical orders, the circular here is shaped through such processes as scuffing, creasing, and staining.  Across the project as a whole, these diverging approaches are freely allowed to overlay and undercut one another in varying and generative ways.

— David Merritt