Artist
Statement
A sailor by trade and artist by night, born in the North Sea port of Hull, England. Mercer's artwork is conceived in the elements, and produced in a darkroom taking the form of cinematic-film and photography - incorporating watercolor, text, screenprinting, and performance.
The sublime becomes entangled with its potential opposites: the boundless and the miniature, the wild and the domestic, the chaotic and the rational, the consecrated and the crumby. Mice chew through string dropping watercolor balloons from a mast, fish tanks are placed in front of super 8 projectors, and seagulls rip to shreds posters of dead artists.
Mercer's work is a derailment of high-art ideology framing our alienation from nature not as poetic tragedy but as a forced separation - a state of affairs in need of rupture not reverence.