Artist on the Rise: Emily Mercer

When it comes to visual and performing arts, there’s always a new story, a new perspective, a new angle to explore — and for University of Sioux Falls (USF) sophomore Emily Mercer, this interplay between the two pursuits has offered up valuable insight into what it means to be an artist with something to say.

Emily Mercer

“For me, I really think it comes back to that storytelling aspect,” she said. “I really enjoy the ability to create a story with art. It really fascinates me. And honestly, just the human ability to create, I think, is enough motivation to do it. A lot of people will say, ‘it's been done before, so what's the point,’ but I would say, you haven't done it before, so it's intrinsically going to be something new.”

It was this spirit of exploration of self and the world around her that led Mercer to the artistry of graphic novels early in her artistic journey. She found this sort of cross-section of creativity a perfect amalgamation of her goals as an artist.

“When I was younger, I just always loved drawing,” she said. “I would take these huge legal pads of paper from my dad's office, and I would draw page-by-page comic stories. I was always obsessed with comics. I sort of got started with Alessandro Barbucci’s W.I.T.C.H. series, which is a series of graphic novels. I loved that and I loved the style, and I would just spend hours staring at the way that he drew people and trying to recreate that. It's always been a part of my life, and from there, I just never stopped drawing, I guess.”

She credits her familial support in particular as part of what has enabled her to cultivate her skills over the years and explore her motivations as an artist. The child of parents in library science and rural development, her visual arts pursuit were a bit of an outlier.

“I was always reinforced as an artist,” she said. “My parents, my brothers — they were immensely supportive. Having that support system of people who love to see me doing what I love and believe that I'm capable of doing something with it and making a difference with it, that's hugely impactful.

“As an adult artist now, even just tapping into that little girl who loved it so much and wasn't even necessarily worried about the finished product, just loved creating for the sake of creating — I think she has everything to do with where I'm at now and why I'm still drawing and painting and doing all this silly stuff with a pencil and pen.”

The particularity of the media of graphite and ink continued to draw Mercer’s attention as she cultivated her skills, which she says is partially an indicator of her gravitation toward detail.

“I think I enjoy the ability to create such minute detail I feel is really helped by those media,” the USF art and English major said. “I am a bit of a perfectionist in my art, so I enjoy being able to, I guess, really get the fine details. And I feel that with acrylics and with watercolor, both of which I enjoy, I'm not able to achieve that same level of detail. But also, ink and graphite aid me in my particular style of art, which is more so realism slash comic art, depending on what I'm drawing.”

The Fonda, Iowa native got an initial taste of large-scale — and public — visual artistry when she was selected to paint a mural for her rural community’s sesquicentennial celebration as a junior in high school.

“It was on this exposed wall in the downtown area,” she said. “That was a huge challenge, but it was immensely rewarding to be able to design a mural, pitch it to the city council and really see it take shape. I got to collaborate with a lot of students in my school's art club, which I was president of at the time, and being able to organize that and see it come to fruition and work on that scale, that was really rewarding. And I had already known that I wanted to do art for the rest of my life, but being able to see the results of that was huge.”

Nowhere does this exploration of storytelling and visual art more intersect than in Mercer’s dalliance with theatre, another aspect of her time at USF both on and off stage.

“That’s one of the things that I love and value most about both visual and performing arts is their ability to connect people,” she said. “I guess under this shared umbrella of humanity, just the ability of art and performing art to tell a story and capture emotion and really connect people is something that I love. Their potential to enact change, as well, is something I sincerely value. But they're also just fun. I just have a really good time in both.”

In her time at USF, Mercer has performed as part of the university’s production of Once Upon a Mattress and most recently has assisted in scenic painting for an upcoming production of Big Fish.

“USF has honestly just given me so much opportunity to create and to grow my skills as an artist,” she said. “We not only have fabulous, wonderful professors like Ceca Cooper, Joe Schaeffer, all those wonderful, amazing people, but also they really give you a lot of opportunity to be hands-on and to grow your skills and push you outside of your comfort zone in a way that will benefit you in the future.

“The studio classes are great ways of really being able to delve into your art, but even outside of that, I've had a lot of opportunity to paint sets for the theatre program here. We're currently putting on Big Fish, and I've gotten to be both an actor and a set painter in that, which is really special. It is very cool to see how theater and art are combined in that way.”

As she seeks inspiration in the world and people around her, Mercer puts a special emphasis on seeing the unique qualities of seemingly mundane things. 

“Honestly, I am really inspired by the beauty of the everyday,” she said. “I think that the world around us has so much beauty to be seen in the simple nature of being alive on this earth, and I find inspiration in everything. I'll be walking around a crowd with my partner, and I'll see some people and be like, ‘I want to draw them,’ and I think that being able to convey the beauty of that is so special. I think life itself is the inspiration in a lot of ways.

“And I think there's something amazing about being able to create something tangible and capture the world around you in that way that can maybe connect to other people. And honestly, just having done art for my entire life, I can't imagine my life without it. It's just always been a way for me to connect with the world around me and to speak to the people around me.”