Lara Merrett, urchins, 2023. Ink and acrylic on cloth and linen, 220 x 150cm. Courtesy: the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Melbourne.

Sullivan+Strumpf, Melbourne, presents an exhibition of works by Lara Merrett which explores concepts of materiality and mystic thinking.

Infused wholly with notions of non-dualism – a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, and the negation of dualistic thinking – the exhibition refers to the artist’s own ocean swimming and experience of ‘limitless extension’. This total immersion, of being both at one with the ocean and at the mercy of the currents and the larger forces of nature is known In psychoanalytic terms as ‘oceanic feeling’’ – the Freudian notion of an expansion of consciousness beyond one’s body, the sense that there is something bigger than ourselves.

Opening Event: Thursday 20 July, 6pm.

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