Mercury Swift
they/xe
Mercury Swift is a non-binary artist living in Baltimore, Maryland. Their identity is based in the notion that xe is a soul more than a body or mind. Swift plays with life as theater. A day is a performance of the observer/navigator of thoughts, patterns, systems and individuals. Swift envisions a crystalline inner viewer; something immaterial and energetic rather than physical. In their art practice, xe is meditating on experiences of their non-binary soul — creating relics of fleeting emotions and sensations. Xe finds energetic potency in illustrating meditations in materials that are extracted from earth and synthesized into metals, glass and plastics.
"Mercury Swift seeks to analyze, define, embody and grow non-binary beauty. They look to the natural world: plant life, insects, markers of water and wind; as well as scientific drawings of the micro and macro to find universal patterns. They also see these patterns reflected in the digital world: lasers emit light waves like stars and motherboards carry information like our nervous systems. Swift is interested in envisioning the immaterial, taking visual cues from meditations to orchestrate and recreate natural forms. They illustrate their energetic body in geometric and figurative forms, creating relationships between math, spirituality, nature, and the physical body. These relationships create stories of cycles, infancy, longing, self-actualization, destruction, and reincarnation."
“My sensation of queerphoria comes as I shed outside perceptions and experience the uninhibited bliss I've cultivated under my skin. I'm lined in roots and moss and berries, all sticky sweet and infiltrated with micro-plastics. My wires light, pulses of information make shooting stars in the atmosphere of my organs. I am vile and divine, borderline artificial. Isn't the body artificial if we make it, cell by cell? My machine fries from the inside out; I enjoy it.”
What does [queerphoria] mean to you? This can be something felt, experienced, or made.
Strawberry, silver and resin, 2 x .75 x .5 in, 2020
“With my materials, I get to explore the limitations of form as I experience the limitations of myself energetically and physically. I create narratives that play with the body, made with materials that interact with our bodies internally and externally. I'm interested in the universality of element; metals, minerals and synthetics found in our blood and tissue are also used in formulations of materials I use in my work. In regard to perception, metal carries connotations of strength and masculinity, glass of fragility and femininity, and plastic of pliability and otherinity. I play with perception as paradox, using moments of material ambiguity to dissolve expectation and point to the universality of our inner most structures.”
What does being queer mean to you in relation to your material choices? Is it something you consider?
“My work is queer because of my intentions. Queerness enters my work because my artistic labor involves processing my relationship to myself and to the elemental rhythm of the world. I speak a language to and through my materials, transcending gender and crystallizing the space in time that my non-binary spirit exists. I find my most fluid expressions of gender and creation in adorning the body my spirit resides in and that of others.”
Is the work queer because the maker is queer, or is it queer because the subject matter is queer?
Hurricane, copper and silver, 3 x 2.75 x .1 in, 2019
“My studio practice provides me the opportunity to be at my most present within my body. My glass and metal processes require the combined efforts of my total mind and body. My digital processes require a complete deconstruction of my dreams so that I can orchestrate them with the rhythm of my internal world. Through these processes I am fully in tune with myself, and I give myself the gift of making my own luxury. I believe in the Buddhist teaching that desire leads to suffering. I get to mitigate suffering by holding the skills to form my own objects of desire.”
What role does your studio practice play in your identity- if at all?
“I intend to provide fellow non-binary people with a sense of belonging. I intend to interact with our subconscious through visual stimulation, engaging the energetic body with universal patterns that carry non-binary beauty. As for people who are not non-binary people, I intend for the visual and energetic exchange to impact their sense of beauty by pushing boundaries past the constraints of femininity and masculinity, into something alien.”
When creating your work, do you consider the relationship your object has with the viewer?
Bloom, soda lime glass resin and silicone, 18 x 8.5 x 2.5 in, 2021
“I am so happy to be alive and creating in this moment. The current synthesis of tech and nature is reaching a point of chaos with potential we cannot fathom. Too slowly, we are re-learning that we are not just on earth, we are integrated with earth. What we do to our planet comes back to us one-thousand-fold, through love and through revenge.
I think AI is helping to remind us that we are nature. Our blood flows the same as through a dog; our neurons fire like the hyphae of mycelium. But also, our minds process information like computers. Input births output; each action is fed by calculation. Did we do this on purpose, or is this the natural rhythm of our plane? I am always finding synchronizations of nature and tech; I am always finding human life at the midpoint. But will this carry true forever? How soon will human existence be no more than a memory stored in the earth cloud?
Save our souls; no nuclear war.”