Renee Cosgrave and Merryn Lloyd: Much like cooking a meal

Biannual façade commission

22 Jan to 20 July 2025

Renee Cosgrave and Merryn Lloyd’s, Much like cooking a meal, emerges from an on-and-off collaborative practice spanning almost two decades. Both artists are mums to young children and find economy in their shared making and approach to studio time. They describe this process as ‘much like cooking a meal’; time spent attending to materials resulting in a finished outcome. Their new creative routine situates studio-practice alongside and enmeshed in their responsibilities, and they embrace the limitations of this as a generative practice.

Cosgrave is a painter, weaver and mother, from Aotearoa (New Zealand). Her iwi (tribe) is Ngāti Tūwharetoa. Cosgrave’s works reflect on her Tūrangawaewae (homebase) and culture through colour, pattern and gesture. Recently, she has been reflecting on the blue and green hues of the waters of Waikato River and Lake Taupō, where she is from.

Lloyd’s recent practice responds to the limited time associated with parenthood, applying her established methodical and process-driven practice to working with fabrics, pre-prepared surfaces and pre-existing artworks. Lately she has spent more time sewing: making quilts for midwives and babies, repairing items around the house, and as a gesture holding things together. She engages with ideas that percolate while she mothers, creating frameworks for new works and relishing the opportunity to complete a small work in a single sitting.

Working collaboratively in the architecture of the façade window, Cosgrave and Lloyd use domestic tools such as spray bottles, brooms, window cleaning materials and drills to apply paint directly onto the window’s surface. In dialogue with existing paintings and drawings, these gestural processes relinquish control of the work’s outcome and embrace the surprise of collaboration. Just as collaboration breaks the solitude of studio practice, working together in the public space of the façade alongside their children, breaks distinctions between creation, play, chance, performance and mothering. The production of this work and its unknown outcome, is described by Cosgrave and Lloyd as ‘in between knowing’.

Public program:

Saturday 25 January 2025
Drop in and make collective window painting for kids

Tile image: Renee Cosgrave and Merryn Lloyd, Merryn Then Renee, 2011. Photo: Adam John Cullen