Andrew Merritt

The supermarket provides us with all our daily needs – where once we wandered the woods for our daily needs we now wander the aisles. This project subverts the idea of a supermarket through sculpture and interactive design. Through prototyping, the project will connect us to our ecosystems through food, where it comes from, and what history, as well as futurology, tells us about how western society comprehends its relationship, or lack of, to food. 

In 2022-23 Andrew Merritt from artist group Something & Son has been completing a residency at Orleans House Gallery.  For information on the exhibition click here. 

Andrew has been working in collaboration with ethnobotanists, artists, ecologists, farmers, and the forest itself throughout his residency and exhibition. He has worked with Dr Sarah Edwards, Dr Raj Puri, Dr Kim Salmons, Arji Manuelpillai, Orleans House Gallery volunteers, Rachel Payne and Emma Leach.  This project has been kindly supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). 

Andrew Merritt bio

Andrew Merritt’s work explores social and environmental issues via everyday scenarios criss-crossing the boundaries between the visual arts, architecture and activism. Through permanent installations, functional sculptures and public performances, projects provide a framework or foundation for communities and ecologies to build upon. Works mimic the everyday to act as familiar starting point and then take the subject into new realms.  Merritt is one half of the artist duo Something & Son.  

Something & Son have exhibited at Tate Britain; Tate Modern;  V&A Museum; Manchester International Festival; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Deon Foundation, Netherlands;  Vienna Biennale/MAK; Artangel; Milan Design Week; FACT, Liverpool; Cultural Olympia; Somerset House; Folkestone Art Triennial; Design Museum; Royal Botanical Gardens Kew; the Wellcome Collection; and Istanbul Design Biennial.  

Talks and workshops include the Serpentine Gallery, Kunst-Werke (Berlin), the Science Museum, SALT (Istanbul), Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (Zurich), CIT (Ireland) Design, Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins, Riga Technical University (Latvia), Design Indaba (Cape Town), British Council, ICA and the Barbican.  

Merritt’s current and upcoming projects include Something & Son’s largest sculpture to date Future Fossil which will fossilise a suburban house; Intertidal Allotment on the Isle of Sheppey with Cement Fields; a project with Somerset House Studios and Kings College London about Human Wildlife Conflict and situated in India and Kenya; Future Amazonia with Museu Emilio Goeldi in Brazil looking at the 64 types of produce that grow in an intact Amazon; a residency at the Delfina Foundation’s Politics of Food programme and a commission with the South London Gallery.