Lydia Merrett
An extended biography I wrote for artist Lydia Merrett following a visit to her London studio in December 2023.
Experiences of womanhood sit at the heart of Lydia Merrett’s practice, which incorporates painting, drawing and printmaking. Her large-scale canvases celebrate women’s emotional, physical and psychological capabilities, whether they are captured running, practising a headstand or preparing for the act of painting. Taking the female figure as her primary subject matter, Merrett employs a bold palette and a dynamic approach to her materials to convey the inner lives of her characters, explaining ‘colour, scale and gesture are essential to describe feelings of celebration, discomfort, pain and pleasure, universal experiences felt by us all.’ Connecting these themes to her own processes of creation and resilience as an artist, she continues, ‘the paintings are a joyful expression of overcoming adversity and relishing in the thrill of painting.’
Lydia Merrett, Afterglow, 2023. Photo: @studio_adamson
Contextualised against traditional art-historical representations of women that frequently constrain the female body within interior settings or sexualise it as an object of desire, Merrett’s paintings champion the potential for women to find freedom and friendship through physical expression. The active body becomes a site of confidence for women from which they are able to orientate and assert their place in the world as they engage in a diverse range of activities. A sustained investigation into these ideas has led Merrett to the painterly potential of women’s sport, which has become one of the key subjects through which she has explored female agency in recent years. Women are shown participating in endurance and team sports: from long-distance running to swimming and football.
Merrett’s figures are typically captured mid-action against monochromatic backgrounds laid down in zingy palettes of green, blue, pink and orange. Isolated from their surroundings, it is the women’s physical prowess that is emphasised in her paintings, whether the characters are participating in activities on the sportsfield or in the studio. Often articulated atop yellow underpainting, their forms seem to vibrate with an energy facilitated by the juxtaposition of colour. In a technique that underpins her compositions with a sense of movement, she employs gestural brushstrokes, which sweep around the contours of the women’s bodies. In one painting, these fluid brushstrokes emulate the wind rushing past her runners as they propel themselves through the air, their faces blurred in expressions of elated determination.
Lydia Merrett, Breaking Boundaries, 2023. Photo: @studio_adamson
Crucially, the power of Merrett’s paintings does not solely reside in the bodily performances of her figures but also encompasses her conviction in the importance of female communities. In one work, a costume professional helps a performer into a voluminous garment backstage, while others capture football players in moments of celebratory camaraderie, embracing one another and pumping their fists in the air. Even when her figures are presented alone on a canvas or sheet of paper, they are connected to each other through the larger community of women established across her body of work, cumulatively visualising an empowered network of diverse female experience.
Addressing the ways in which identity and community might be signified through the body, Merrett has identified clothing as another enduring motif in her practice. Just as a sports uniform indicates both physical prowess and an affiliation with a particular team, Merrett conceives of her painting jeans as a signifier of her identity as an artist. In a large-scale painting from 2023, It’s Been Quite a Ride, she presents three iterations of herself, side-by-side, putting on her jeans. Moving from left to right, each version of the garment becomes increasingly paint splattered to visualise the skills, techniques and experiences she accrued during her training at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Finding parallels with the development of sporting proficiency, she asserts the importance of repetition as an essential component in the acquisition and honing of a skill; the artist must return to the studio again and again in order to develop their practice, just as the footballer must return to the pitch and the runner to the racetrack.
Lydia Merrett, It's Been Quite a Ride, 2023. Photo: @studio_adamson
Across her thematic investigation of womanhood conducted in a variety of chosen mediums, drawing emerges as an enduring and central aspect of Merrett practice. She describes how, for her, it is ‘a way of loosening up, deconstructing and collaging imagery.’ Drawing also facilitates a mode of freeform thinking that allows her to experiment with different compositional strategies and ways of representing the body, often resulting in dynamic line drawings of figures in motion. While standing as a generative, self-supporting activity, drawing also serves a preparatory function in Merrett’s painting practice. She typically creates large-scale drawings of a work to ‘get the line’ of her subject matter into her body in advance of beginning a work. Developing this muscle memory before picking up a brush permits her to achieve a fluidity that conveys the bodily freedom of her figures.
Such fluidity also supports Merrett’s endeavours in monotype printing. Here, she rapidly paints a composition onto glass before pressing a sheet of paper to its surface while the paint is still wet to create a mirror image. Relishing the ‘unavoidable materiality’ of her mediums, Merrett embraces the power of their tactility. ‘I am endlessly fascinated and surprised by oil paint,’ she explains with deep enthusiasm, ‘and every time I paint, another characteristic of painting reveals itself to me.’
Lydia Merrett, For The Love Of It All, 2023. Photo: @studio_adamson
Lydia Merrett lives and works between London, Manchester and the South of France. Following a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, she graduated with an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2023, winning the Almacantar Studio Award and The Terence Cuneo Memorial Trust prize. Merrett teaches at university level and is currently a part-time lecturer in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work has been exhibited across the UK and, in 2024, she presented an online exhibition with Unit London and will have her first international exhibition in Seoul.
Images courtesy of Lydia Merrett