Merlin’s work explores the interplay between vigor and vulnerability as inscribed in posture and matter. He questions the promise of improvement brought about by technology, contemplating both our species’ alienation and the continuity of our shared condition. Fascinated with the uncanny yet unafraid of primal pulse, his practice operates between glitch and virus. He embraces a hybrid idea of the human between animal and mutant, the tension between organic flow and geometric control is of key interest to him. The juxtaposition and conflation of figural and industrial elements is a recurring motif in his paintings. Confronting brush with jigsaw, he tackles the picture plane as a spatial device that blends physical fact with illusion. In turn, his work operates on both a level of perspectival suggestion and relief. It is an ambiguous dynamic between striving and falling that he is keen to investigate - in depiction and construction alike. Partly countering, partly surrendering to gravity and the material’s innate resistance, he hopes to produce chiastic resonances that destabilize common tropes of ‘nature' and ‘artifice‘.