Studio
Every piece starts with something I've been feeling and haven't finished thinking about.
The question underneath the studio isn't what furniture would look like if it were strange. It's what a feeling looks like once it has to hold weight. A stool caught in the middle of buckling, with the seat still perfectly level. A floor lamp that reverses its own direction at every joint and arrives anyway. A credenza that wants to hold more than it has room for, at full capacity, still coming up short.
Each one is an object that is slightly bad at its job, and the failure is the part that carries the meaning. Something that works perfectly has nothing to tell you.
The names come from the same place. They're ordinary phrases, the sort of thing a person actually says. Fine, Thanks. I Know a Shortcut. Be Careful. Here to Help. Nobody announces what they're feeling. They deflect, they understate, they insist they're fine. The objects do the same, and the gap between what a piece says and what its shape is doing is where the work happens.
Form follows the emotion rather than a house style. Pieces still holding themselves together stay rigid. Pieces that have stopped resisting go soft and organic. Resin suits this because it argues back: it pools, drips and sets at angles I didn't plan, and that resistance stays visible in the finished object. Foam and epoxy clay handle the volumes that can't be poured. Colour does the opposite job. High-gloss bubblegum pink, chartreuse, cobalt, bright enough that none of it reads as tragedy. Tired, not defeated.
These aren't objects about other people's feelings. They're my own decisions, reflexes and reflections, worked out at furniture scale, in a room where somebody has to live with them.
The work is funny on purpose. The form is serious anyway. Both of those things stay true.
Bio
Ryan Mercer is a designer and maker based in Montréal, Quebec, where he relocated his studio in July 2026, the city's 20-year anniversary as a UNESCO City of Design. He works in sculptural furniture and lighting, hand-built from resin, foam and epoxy clay, then hand-painted and finished in high-gloss.
Every piece begins with a feeling he's been sitting with and takes the form of an object that can't quite do its job: sagging, spiked, buckling, straining, or refusing to sit level. Some pieces are 1-of-1, others arrive in small editions with intentionally uneven colour runs. Names come from ordinary human phrases rather than categories, because nobody announces what they're feeling either.
Practice
Mercer is self-taught. The practice was built entirely by hand-sculpting over several years, with 3D modelling added around 2024 to support larger and more complex forms.
Smaller and medium work is designed in Blender, rebuilt by hand in Monster Clay, moulded in silicone and cast in resin, then assembled, sanded, primed, painted and clear coated. Larger work is sculpted digitally, sectioned, printed across the studio's large-format resin printer fleet, then assembled and finished the same way. Every leg, shade and warped detail is shaped one at a time.
Representation
- International Design (Kunstik OÜ), Estonia. Ongoing partnership.
- Adorno, international design platform.
- ryanmercer.ca, direct studio sales.
Enquiries
Press, exhibition, commission and stockist enquiries are welcome via the contact page.