Bonnie Mercer (b. 1978, Melbourne) is a musician, sound artist, and product designer whose work, across twenty-five years and two practices, keeps returning to the same questions: who gets to participate, and what does it take to make room for the people most often left out.
Mercer’s music is loud, hypnotic, and experimental, grounded in rock forms but equally at home in drone, noise, free improvisation, and traditional song. She was a founding member of Grey Daturas (2001–2010), whose feedback-drenched performances built a devoted global following through relentless touring across Australia, the USA, Europe, Japan, and New Zealand. She has been a member of LA-based Dumb Numbers since 2012, alongside musicians from the Melvins, Dinosaur Jr, Best Coast, Magic Dirt, and Jesus Lizard; supporting My Bloody Valentine on their North American tour in 2013, and the Lemonheads on the West Coast in 2015. Other projects include Breathing Shrine, Down Under, Little Desert, Dead River, Hospital Pass, and Michael Beach.
Her solo work explores the electric guitar through feedback, distortion, and noise. In 2018, Psychic Hysteria released Mystic Decade, a ten-year retrospective of her recordings. That same year she was a section leader and conductor for Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail, scored for 100 electric guitars, at the Sydney Festival, and was commissioned by Cross Yarra Partnership to create an audio/visual response to Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel construction, presented at ACMI. She has performed at SXSW and opened for Shellac, Sleep, Earth, Boris, and Grouper.
In 2019, Mercer had a stroke. It affected her movement, energy, and sense of self; she had to completely relearn how to play guitar. What began as necessity became the foundation of everything she makes now. Female Cop Recordings (2020), which found her singing and playing piano for the first time, emerged directly from this period; she described the material as “recent distant memories that I’ve been unable to extract until now.” In 2021 she released two split 12-inches; one with Tom Lyngcoln on Nice Music and another with YLP on Downwards Records, and was awarded the inaugural Bakehouse Music Bursary for women and non-binary artists.
Her current practice is inseparable from her ongoing recovery. Themes of fatigue, non-linear time, and bodily transformation run through long-form improvisation, drone, and repetition that mirrors the slow, uneven nature of healing. Recent work includes Are You Better Yet?, an instructional score that uses repetitive exercises drawn from stroke rehabilitation to examine recovery’s resistance to straightforward progress, and to challenge the pressure to get better quickly. Open Jam Invitation (2025) extends this into community; a freely downloadable track open to anyone who wants to add to it, with no brief and no deadline. The work is political as well as personal; Mercer is interested in expanding what counts as valuable artistic practice and in making audible what is usually invisible: cognitive load, sensory overload, the quiet persistence required in ongoing recovery.
Her work as a product designer is informed by the same questions. Mercer leads design at a global SaaS company, where she built the design function from the ground up, developing accessibility-first practices for a platform dedicated to civic participation; giving communities meaningful access to the decisions that affect them. Design thinking runs through everything she does, across teams, disciplines, and the spaces between the people making something and the people it’s made for. She writes about creativity, design leadership, and the intersections between artistic and technological culture.
