Mercy is an emerging artist, designer & curator based in Naarm (Melbourne).
They are experienced working in the community and council run arts sectors, most specifically in curation and program development. Their own conceptual arts and writing practice centres foremost around the probability of queer abstraction. Strong influences to their practice include; the auto-theoretical, fictocritical, and phenomenological. Mercy’s work takes a conceptual approach to sculpture, photography, writing, and assemblage that concentrates on the study of consciousness and queerness. As an arts worker, they are interested in elevating the visibility and experience of LGBTQ+ people in regional Australia.
"I wish to promote a visual experience that is perversely dynamic, by provoking and encouraging an internal assessment of how we perceive objects and how manipulating space and the queering of context can influence this. I want the viewer to recognise the familiar but be moved by the obscured. A warped experience of what is expected. For me, this shared experience becomes performative, through a level platform of collaboration studying how we all react to certain experiences through self. I am most interested in how abstraction can be used a tool to make visual representations of the unspeakable.”
I pay great respect to the rightful custodians of the country I am from; Noonuccal and Goenpul country, Minjerribah in the Quandamooka Nation, & Widjabul Wia-bul country in the Bundjalung nation. And also, to the rightful custodians of the country I currently live; Wurundjeri Woi wurrung country in the Kulin Nation. I honour theirs, and all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders and Ancestors. I acknowledge the sovereignty of all First Nations peoples and recognise that it has never been ceded. I acknowledge the occupation of all countries, and the ongoing trauma resulting from this.
“Let no-one say the past is dead, the past is all about us and within.”