Merrington combines wall drawings with light-boxes containing carefully constructed still-life photographs. Her wall drawings always relate to the architecture of the space and are based on the kinds of drawings found in girls’ annuals of the late 50s and early 60s. “I tamper with these to make them my own”, says Merrington. “They hint at an adventure which could turn into something more dangerous.”

The photographic pieces refer to 18th century Dutch painting and are ‘very much about time’. They show collections of modern popular memorabilia.

The nostalgic aspect of Merrington’s work is more about collective memory than any personal nostalgia of the artist’s: all the sources are from before her birth. However, the people in her suggested narratives, who seem to belong to a golden and strangely innocent age, can represent idealised characters she would like to have been.

“In the 50s and 60s Britain and America were producing more of their own products, and I’m interested in that consumer boom and what it means: fashion, furniture, everything.” The photos and illustrations of the time, which were frequently combined in a way that now seems oddly contemporary, have a charm which she admits to being seduced by, along with many other artists. In her work the emergence of the teenager is equated with the vanitas tradition, exemplified for her in the Dutch still lifes.

Her use of black and white wall-drawings alongside brightly coloured and brightly-lit photographs creates a tension, has a certain distancing effect on both sets of images. It has been written of her installations that they can haunt a gallery like a ghost. The key to the work perhaps is the combination of personal and social. While her images sometimes seem to show the memories or obsessions of a single individual, they are even more potently visions of a collective consciousness.

text by David Lillington