Mercedes grew up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, within walking distance of the Atlantic Ocean. Her love for the natural world, especially wild and remote places, has led her to working as a deckhand on a pilot boat, a wilderness guide in Maine and Labrador, an environmental educator, a fine art and documentary photographer, and traveler for a year around the Pacific Rim. She began her artistic exploration through photography, and often uses her photographs for painting reference in the studio. After a Monhegan Artists' Residency in 2007, she was inspired to begin painting as a way to convey the unique energy present in each place. In 2024, she was an Artist in Residence at The Burren College of Art in Ireland, where she continued to explore making inks from foraged materials for use in her painting and experimental printmaking. In 2026, she participated in residencies in Southwest Finland and the French Pyrenees, where she created her largest paintings to date, focusing even more on the use of environmentally sustainable materials, and made nightly excursions to nearby forests and rivers to record bats and owls. In 2027, she will be a participant in the Arctic Circle Art & Science Expedition in the High Arctic. She is moved by the beauty, mystery and dream-like qualities that exist in everyday moments, and aims to express these feelings and observations through her work. She has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally, and lives and works in San Francisco. When she is not painting, she's writing songs, and making field recordings both above and below the waterline.