Uncharted Waters: Diving Headfirst into Uncertainty

Natalie Ernst is playing with her cat, a gorgeous mixed-breed domestic shorthair with tabby and white coloring. His name is Wirt. He’s sprawled out onto the floor of her studio apartment on his stomach in a position Ernst affectionately refers to as a “Wirt sploot.” It was just over two years ago that she rescued him as a stray when one of her friends found him in the alley behind their Midtown college apartment in St. Louis city. It was January 2023. A cold and unforgiving Missouri winter was on the horizon. A junior in college juggling school, work, and a vibrant social life, Ernst took Wirt in without giving it a second thought. This was at a time he really needed her.

SIREN BAPTIZED  “If I want something done right, I’m going to do it myself.” Custom mermaid tail and beaded top by Hiblovic and Ernst.

I met her around the same time in our Consumer Behavior class at the Saint Louis University Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business. I was an accounting major, and I had just decided to take on a second major: marketing. On the first day of class, our professor said “Next class, think about where you want to sit, because those will be your permanent seats.” I remember moving across the room to sit next to a girl I thought was cute. I didn’t want to sit directly next to her; I sat one seat over. We wrote our names on the attendance sheet, and we realized we’re both Croatian. If you’re from any area of the Balkans, you know how big of a deal that is. The conversation was going swimmingly. Twenty minutes later, Ernst walks in, Starbucks in hand, naturally assuming the only open seat left, the seat between me and my class crush. I was a tad upset, but not for long. Like she does with everyone she meets for the first time, she immediately charmed me with her Southern hospitality, joking around and asking questions to get to know me. By the end of class, we were already friends. We started whispering over the professor every class (even though we had agreed that we hate people who do that), talking during small groups about everything except the work, lingering after class to discuss our pet peeves…of which we share quite a lot. We had our entire lives to catch up on. “We met because I completely cockblocked you from that one girl without knowing it,” Ernst recalls, cracking up. “But it worked out, because here we are two years later. Best friends.“

By the time I chose Ernst for this issue of 21 Artistry, we had been so close for so long that I prefaced the news by saying there’s no way this profile is going to be unbiased. This is going to be insider baseball at its finest. We know each other very well, but journalistic integrity? We don’t know her. After all, we’re business majors, not journalism majors. However, I can write my ass off, and Ernst can yap her ass off, so we’re more qualified than you might think.

COASTAL COUTURE  Custom mermaid tail and beaded top by Hiblovic and Ernst.

Ernst grew up in a quaint and quiet HOA in Louisville, Kentucky with her parents and younger sister. “Loo-UH-VUHL,” she often clarifies when I mispronounce it. “Not Loo-EE-VILLE.” Her parents always provided her a comfortable life, but they expected her to become independent when she became of age. Ernst has been working almost full time since she was fifteen years old and takes pride in her self-sufficiency. When she began working, her hours were scheduled around her attendance at a small liberal arts high school. “Growing up in Louisville I met a lot of people from different walks of life with different personalities and different interests,” Ernst says. “All my teachers were cool ass hippies. Kentucky is a mix of people. It’s in a unique area where the Midwest is north of it, Appalachia is east of it, the South is South of it. We fall into this vacuum of so many different types of people. That environment taught me to communicate with people of any background. There’s not one set culture in Kentucky.”

When she wasn’t focused on school or work, Ernst spent her time perfecting her makeup style inspired by the 2015-2019 YouTube era beauty gurus, learning how to cut the perfect crease from creators like James Charles, Jeffree Star, Jaclyn Hill, Tati Westbrook, and NikkieTutorials. “That was the golden age of YouTube,” she says. “I used to wake up at 6 am everyday to do a full beat before school. Those years are the reason I don’t do Republican makeup. I also miss watching Shane Dawson’s conspiracy videos.” 

FULL SPREAD  Tail, tide, and timing aligned.

High school wasn’t always the easiest for Ernst. Early on in her teenage years, she fell in with the wrong crowd. She often spent nights away from home in friends’ or strangers’ basements, coming of age and experimenting with drugs and alcohol to cope with untreated depression and anxiety. “A lot of it was self medication. I told my parents I wasn’t doing well, but they wouldn’t listen to me until it hit a breaking point, and I had to go to rehab. Four months in the Utah wilderness. No phones. We would sleep outside under a tarp. We made fire with sticks. It was some caveman monkey brain shit, and it was also the most peaceful I’ve felt in my life.”

Upon returning to Louisville to finish high school, Ernst made a concerted effort to cultivate better friendships. Unfortunately, one of these healthy friendships led her to someone who would bring her back to the same world she had just fought her way out of. Her friend mentioned to her a boy she knew. “You would like him. You all would look so great together,” she assured. Ernst gave him a chance, which she admits was partially out of pity and self resonance. He was an addict, and she was a recently recovered one. Although their relationship started out innocent, over the next year, it descended into what she calls a “downward spiral” that led to him doing the unthinkable. “I’m parked outside of his parents’ house, waiting for him to get there,” she shares. “He pulls up, parks, then pulls out a gun and says ‘Get inside the house.’ When you have a gun pointed at you, you turn into that person’s bitch. You do what you’re told. I go inside the house. He was definitely on something. He was coked out or methed out or something. He held the gun two inches from my temple, then raised it to my head, talking all this crazy shit. For twenty minutes, I’m just in a limbo state. Eventually his mom threatened to call the cops. He tweaked out and ran to his car. I survived. I tried to file a restraining order, but it’s been so long, and I haven’t heard from the detective. I don’t care about pressing charges at this point. He’s probably dead in a ditch somewhere.” 

HEAVEN SENT  Ernst is a vision come to life reaching into the heavens.

Ernst graduated high school in May 2020 and moved to St. Louis for college during the COVID-19 pandemic that fall. Her college experience had a rough start as restrictions were still in place. At first, she made friends with the elementary school approach: knocking on her floor mates’ doors and asking to hang out, mirroring the energy of classmates asking each other on the playground, “Do you want to be my friend?” As restrictions were lifted, Ernst joined the Saint Louis University chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha and made countless friends. She was finally able to have a true college experience, and it was glorious. Ernst became notorious for drinking everyone under the table, but never getting messy. “I was in a sorority,” she says of the experience. “Was I very much a risk for them? Yes. Did I cause a lot of issues? Maybe. But I never got caught throwing up at an event like everyone else, so jokes on them.”

By sophomore year, Ernst had committed to pursuing a degree in marketing, abandoning her original idea of Criminology when a police officer was her first professor. “When choosing my major, I was thinking, ‘How can I get rich? Business,’” Ernst shares. “I’ve always been an art prodigy if you want to call it that. I was in advanced art classes from a very young age. I’ve always really enjoyed visual arts. I thought about how I could apply that to a career. I landed on graphic design. Where does graphic design come in? Marketing. That’s how I became a marketing major. I did a lot of computer art, Adobe Illustrator, and animation. It was a really cool experience to go from doing fine arts with paint brushes by hand to digital art on a computer and seeing the different methods and means of getting an end result. Now doing shoots with you, those visual art skill sets have really come into play.”

PROOF OF CONCEPT  Custom mermaid tail and beaded top by Hiblovic and Ernst.

Ernst contains multitudes. By day, she works full time as a marketing research analyst for a company here in town, leveraging AI and code to solve problems for her clients. She interviewed for this role weeks before her graduation last April after a professor referred her. Ernst rarely attended his class, but one afternoon, on a day like any other, she felt the desire, and she took the opportunity to raise her hand and answer every question she could. Her professor took notice, and days later she was interviewing, while unfortunately, facing a cutthroat job market, a lot of her peers were struggling to find post-graduation work. Within the week, she was hired and expected to begin her first “big girl job” one week after graduation. Ready or not, she would have to adapt. “Before I started my job, I knew nothing about programming,” Ernst says. “I’ve never been trained in programming. I kind of just threw myself in there. I said to myself ‘I guess I’m going to have to figure it the fuck out, because what else am I supposed to do?’ That’s the way of life. If you don’t have determination and if you can’t problem solve and figure it out, you’re not gonna go very far. I’m convinced that I can do anything on the planet within reason. If I set my mind to it, I can do it.”

OCEAN-PROOF BEAT  A child of the YouTube beauty guru era, Ernst says it’s the reason for her “Democrat” makeup.

I said to myself ‘I guess I’m going to have to figure it the fuck out, because what else am I supposed to do?’ That’s the way of life. If you don’t have determination and if you can’t problem solve and figure it out, you’re not gonna go very far. I’m convinced that I can do anything on the planet within reason. If I set my mind to it, I can do it.”

On a Friday night, you can almost always find Ernst at The Grove, a street in town known for its numerous gay bars which she fondly and accurately refers to as “the gay Mecca of St. Louis.” She’ll likely go up to a regular and say things like, “I think we as a society moved on from Kesha’s ‘JOYRIDE’ way too soon.” She’s got a point.

“It needs to be said that I did not achieve gay icon status on my own in the St. Louis community,” Nat explains. “Ryan Pelis, my roommate in college, was really prominent in the St. Louis gay scene. Being his roommate and really good friend, we would just naturally end up going out to The Grove together all the time, and I’d meet all these amazing people he knows. It turns out Ryan knows people in high places because he introduced me to one of the most prominent gay DJs in St. Louis, JOJO. Shoutout JOJO. So yeah—going out to bars and talking to people, I’ve become known in the St. Louis gay scene.” “And you’re also bisexual,” I interject with a satiric tone. “Yeah I’m not a poser guys! And I’m gonna get canceled for saying this, but furries do not belong in the St. Louis gay scene. What does wanting to be an animal have to do with being gay?” “My grandma is gonna read this,” I inform her. We both start hysterically laughing.

OVER THE SHOULDER  Ernst poses in front of the entrance to Point of Rocks.

Saturdays are for the art. Almost every weekend, Ernst and I set aside at least one day to do a photoshoot or something creative. For both of us, this time is necessary for our mental, physical, and spiritual health. The first shoot we ever did was at our school. One day after class, we were hanging out and we realized we both had a passion for photography and decided we wanted to shoot together. I had found a steeple that seemingly fell from the college church of our Catholic university during a storm. Its glass windows were shattered, and it had been left outside in a discrete corner between the church and one of our lecture halls for months. Neither of us had a vision for the photoshoot. In fact, the location we actually wanted to shoot—a historic Jesuit library and art gallery at our school—was closed for an event. We had to adapt, like we’ve since had to hundreds of times. Following that photoshoot, we’ve created countless more, each presenting a new challenge, a new opportunity for learning, and a new way of seeing the world. On snow days, we road trip through the Missouri wilderness, telling stories about our childhood, sharing our dreams for the future, and pulling over to pet stray dogs. On sunny summer days, we ride horses at the beach in Florida. We run though waterfalls in Kentucky. We take photographs. We create something where nothing existed before. We build each other up. “You and our photoshoots came into my life in kind of a divine timing way,” Ernst says. “I was going through a lot of shit with my ex, and I was feeling really low security and self esteem wise, and then you came along, and we started doing photoshoots. It impacted my life in a 360 way: confidence wise and the way I carry myself. The respect I have for myself is so much greater.”

This photoshoot would be our biggest project yet. The plan was simple. We would transform Ernst into a beautiful mermaid. It wouldn’t be a costume. She would be a mermaid. We would spend the fall making a fishtail, beaded top, and seashell nails from scratch; if Nara Smith can do it so could we. Our focus was on fashion over function. This wasn’t supposed to be a swimmable tail, but a shootable one. After my December finals, we would fly to Sarasota, Florida and spend the week at my family’s house, carving out time for both relaxing and creating. We did however underestimate the scope of this endeavor. “Literally two weeks before Sarasota, we actually started the costume,” Ernst recalls. “We sat down and made an Excel sheet schedule, and we stuck to it. It was hell incarnate. We got no sleep. You were over every single day during your finals working on the mermaid tail while I was working on the beaded top. We’d sit here the entire day and work. We didn’t have anything done by the time we went to Sarasota. The night before the shoot, Philip was in the garage with a gas mask on, pressing the scales on with silicone, and I was inside going between finishing the beaded top and making the nails.” 

AQUAMARINE  “I wanted to be a mermaid. For real. This isn’t cosplay.”

In the week leading up to the shoot, Ernst was bitten on the face by a parrot in the ocean, choked out by a boa constrictor in the wetlands, and aggressively jostled by a horse she was riding on the bay. None of these experiences, however, could’ve prepared her for what was to come. Point of Rocks is positioned at the very end of the public’s access to Siesta Key Beach at the only area of the beach with no public parking. Getting to it is a treacherous journey. We park at a pizza joint a few blocks away. As we prepare to lug the probably 100 pounds worth of materials and equipment we brought, I see The Frog Hop Siesta Islander trolley and instinctively waive down the driver. Ernst recalls: “You see this fucking frog mobile and go, ‘Should we ask him for a ride?’ and I said, ‘No, leave that man alone.’ He gave us a free ride to the location, and we tipped him. We really needed it because when we were getting ready to leave to come to the spot, we just brought everything you could ever need, and that was the big power play on our part.” 

Once we make it to Siesta Key Beach, that’s where the real journey begins. After approaching an elderly man who appears to be a local and asking how to reach Point of Rocks, we realize we have no idea what we were getting ourselves into. He instructs us to swim to the edge of this concrete wall, scale it, then climb down the rocks on the other side from there, which you couldn’t see even a glimpse of from where we were standing. We think he has to be fucking with us, but we have no other choice but to follow his directions. The water is too deep for Ernst to stand, so I wade back and forth from the edge of the wall to the shore, carrying our items over my head.  “When we got over the wall with all of our stuff, we heard music playing,” Ernst recounts. “It was these two teenage girls playing Lana Del Rey. Icons. And we realized, maybe this is it. We were waist deep in the ocean trying not to ruin the camera, trying not to ruin our phones, having to step on rocks to try to climb this concrete structure. We finally made it to Point of Rocks. It was gorgeous.” 

ENTANGLED  Custom mermaid tail and beaded top by Hiblovic and Ernst.

The first step in getting prepared to shoot is helping Ernst into the thirty pound mermaid tail, which is not as smooth of a process as you might imagine. Lying at the edge of a rock in the middle of the ocean, the sun reflecting sparkles on the surface of the water, she shimmies her legs into the elastic fabric tail, then her feet into the skin-tight monofin fluke. “I hadn’t tried on the tail until we got to the location,” she shares. “We knew it was sized to my body and that it would fit. I had tried on the tail, but I hadn’t tried on the tail with the actual tail attachment, and that was what was so heavy. We had to trim the waist a little bit. We were in the middle of the ocean, and you had to swim to shore to get scissors. When you were traveling back and forth and you left me there, this bird came right up to me. Either it means mermaids are real or he thought I was a fish, because he was two inches from me. I could reach out and touch that bird. It was a snowy egret. You are having to haul ass back and forth in the water to get ready for the shoot. I have my tits out, facing the ocean—very liberating. The waves are crashing, and it’s starting to get wet. I’m trying to move around, and I’m paralyzed. You have to pick me up and move me to different spots as we do the shoot. I was worried about getting washed away. There was no mobility in that tail. The reason it wasn’t swimmable is because of the amount of artistry we put into it.”

As we are finally ready to begin shooting, the golden hour sun runs and hides behind the tropical storm clouds. They had been eager to come out to play after a long day of uninterrupted light. It feels like all odds are against us. We decide to go through with the shoot anyway. “We can see what is possible, unburdened by what has been,” as Vice President Kamala Harris famously said during her 2024 presidential campaign. Despite being endlessly scrutinized, picked apart, and memed for her choice of words, Harris owned the power of her phrase and used it to her advantage. “Somehow we still made it work,” Ernst reflects. “It all came together beautifully in the end. It stopped raining. The sun came back out. It felt like it came back just to set the scene for our shoot. This project was quite literally uncharted waters. We just went with the flow. We jumped in head first and said, ‘We’re going to figure out how to make this work,’ and we did. There wasn’t one point throughout where we didn’t think it was going to work.” 

CLOSURE  “The sun came back out. It felt like it came back just to set the scene for our shoot.” Ernst looks into the eye of sunset.

The morning after the shoot, we sit quietly at Project Coffee, which had come to be our favorite breakfast spot over the course of the week. Our seats facing the window, looking out into the street, the sun warms our faces. It’s in silent moments like these where I feel most connected to Ernst, or as I like to call her “Nat.” I feel in my heart a shared sense of joy and fulfillment that comes from executing the shoot the night before and bringing our vision to life. The feeling was almost indescribable, and although we aren’t discussing it at this moment, I know Ernst feels it too. “My future is bright,” Ernst says, breaking the silence. She is referencing a fierce middle-aged woman walking past the window and into the establishment. The woman is wearing a sky blue blouse with white polka dots. She is seemingly dissociating more and more with each step. “She gives zero fucks,” Ernst states.

Throughout human history, there has been speculation about whether or not mermaids are real. Legend has it that the reason scientists have never captured a mermaid is because they only dwell in uncharted waters. They live within the unknown and thrive there, blissfully unaware of the human race and our perceptions of their way of life that have dated back centuries, correct or incorrect, in good faith or not. The entire time I’ve known her, Ernst has navigated the uncharted waters of her own life, and she’s done it with the same grace she had as an ingénue learning to master the butterfly stroke on the neighborhood swim team. She has never let others project their limiting beliefs onto her. In spite of all she’s gone through, she has never stopped diving into the unknown. 

NAIL DETAIL  Ernst rests her hands on the shore of Point of Rocks, showing off our custom seashell nails.

To be Ernst is to stand unafraid in the face of a tidal wave, to be swept away, and to rise to the surface and breathe again. To be Ernst is to not just survive under pressure, but thrive in it. “To successfully navigate uncharted waters, you have to rise to the occasion,” she says. “You have to have the determination to say ‘there’s no other option.’ We said we were going to do this, we’re going to do it. I know that even if I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ll make it happen. If I’m determined enough, it’s going to happen. When faced with uncertainty, you have to choose to sink or swim, and we swam.”

Whether or not it’s possible to separate the art from the artist or the inherent bias from the journalist, we may never know. What I can say for certain, however, is that no matter how hard scientists try, it is impossible to separate the mermaid from the sea, just as it is impossible to separate the Natalie from the Philip. As Cole Porter sings in his classic “Do I Love You?,” “Could the ocean leave the shore?” •

Photography: Philip Hiblovic

Words and Interview: Philip Hiblovic

Styling: Philip Hiblovic and Natalie Ernst

Hair: Philip Hiblovic and Natalie Ernst

Makeup: Philip Hiblovic and Natalie Ernst

Nails: Philip Hiblovic and Natalie Ernst

Creative Direction: Philip Hiblovic and Natalie Ernst

Production: 21 Artistry

Location: Point of Rocks, Siesta Key Beach

Custom mermaid tail by Philip Hiblovic, Natalie Ernst, and Lily Dooley; custom beaded top by Philip Hiblovic and Natalie Ernst; bracelets—artist’s own