Artist Interview: Jenny Mercury
This month’s featured contributor is Jenny Mercury, who chose October’s theme.
Jenny Mercury (she/her) is a writer and artist living in the Midwest. Her chapbook of climate-crisis post-apocalyptic love poems, TERRA INCOGNITA, was published with Dancing Girl Press. She is interested in exploring the surreal intersections between the astral and mundane, the feminine and the weird. Actually she made that up. She likes to hike, bake, and whisper sweet nothings into the Void’s ear. You can find her outside with her cat or avoiding an existential crisis at MoonActivated, hopefully not sporadically.
The theme you chose had me looking for liminal spaces in my life. What are some of your favorite (real or imaginary) liminal spaces?
I’ll name 3 because I love that number and so I guess you could call these my Liminal Trinity. My absolute favorite liminal space and the most accessible one to access is that *peace* of mind I find myself in when I listen to my favorite music. That space you float away to when really listening to music—somewhere in the middle between your current place in time and the memory or feeling the song invokes. You become slightly removed— I guess you could say the song itself is a liminal space. The Middle by Jimmy Eat World comes to mind. Dreams by the Cranberries is the ultimate wonderland. Blink-182’s new album is so nostalgic; but since it’s new, it’s not tied to my past so it feels like being alone in an empty park on a summer night. Another is the song ‘91 by Jack Antonoff. He even sings, “I’m here but I’m not.” Yet, the music is also an anchor. (I’m thinking of the use of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill in Stranger Things).
If music is the most grounding liminal space then the creative flow is the liminal space of liminal spaces. I hope that makes sense—or that I at least do a good job of explaining it if it doesn’t. I think the creative flow is akin to the movie Inception. You start off in the first layer of story (the outline of a story for instance) or the first layer of paint—and keep exponentially losing yourself as you go deeper into each subsequent layer. Eventually you are floating around like Joseph Gordon Levitt. (I know that’s not the final layer, but it’s the one in the middle I think!)
The crown to my Liminal Trinity has to be the space of meditation. I have to clarify intentional meditation as opposed to the one that is found by participating in art as I mentioned above. That space you find yourself in during a long meditation session when you aren’t trying to feel or create anything specifically, when you have fully let go and feel the earth is pulling you down into it while simultaneously feeling so expanded you aren’t just floating around in space like JGL anymore —you ARE THE SPACE. You become everything by becoming nothing. IYKYK.
You were an O.G. Kindred Collective member from when we started ten years ago. What are some ways your art and creative practice have grown in the past decade?
Oh man I definitely have learned to create *for* the process instead of the outcome. I used to be so focused on the outcome that, ironically, I ended up creating nothing.(Sorry, if I used ironically wrong. I grew up listening to Alanis Morrisette!)
Swimmers don’t swim to get to the other side, they swim to be in the water. (Right? I never actually learned how to swim, but that seems right.) So, like Troy Bolton, I’ve learned to keep my head in the game.
Kindred Collective is a collaboration between artist and the chosen theme for the month. In many ways art in general can be considered a collaboration: between the artist and the art that has influenced their work. Which artists or works of art have inspired your work?
There are so many but the ones that I return to the most when I need inspiration or feel stuck are the poems and memoirs of Diane di Prima, the lyrical minimalism of Francesca Lia Block, the otherworldly works of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, the life and work of Frida Kahlo, the irreverent fashion of Penelope Gazin, the atmosphere and prose of Shirley Jackson, the mystical earthiness of Melissa Broder’s poetry and novels, the visionary use of color and spiritual abstraction of Hilma af Klint, the catchy craftsmanship and vulnerability of Taylor Swift and the lyrical quirkiness of Regina Spektor and The Magnetic Fields.
I heard a rumor that you sneak your beloved cat Vana into every story you write…
My sweet scrappy 10 year-old baby. Yes! If you notice a little gray cat in my stories, you have met one of Vana’s (pronounced like Nirvana—her namesake; and *not* like Vanna White. Common misconception!) fictional alter-egos. It is my delusional way of immortalizing her. *insert sweet sad tear emoji*
Where can we find you online if we wanna read/see more?
You can find me on Instagram @moonactivated84 or here on substack at