EMILY MUELLER

BIO:

Emily Mueller is a multimedia artist and curator working primarily with papermak-ing. Her conceptual interests lie in the meditative practice of mark making and the in-vestigation of intuitive form and color. Based in Saint Louis, she teaches photography, design, and fine art classes at universities around the city. Mueller has exhibited work in both online and physical publications as well as galleries in Canada, California, and across the Midwest. She received her MFA from Washington University in Saint Louisand a bachelor’s degree in drawing and painting from the University of San Diego.She currently runs a micro-gallery called The Nook in her house in St. Louis.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Through paper pulp painting and handspun paper-yarn weavings, I make pattern-based works that borrow from the language of quilting, domestic craft, and other inherited forms of labor. In my work, paper-based materials travel across a piece’s surface with my hands repeating the same motions until the object is filled and resolved. In pulp paintings, organically colored squares and rectangles accumulate into loose, uneven grids, often resolving into non-rectangular, shaped forms, as if the patterning has crawled across the paper screens they are made on. In weavings, strips of handmade paper are hand-spun into thread and woven through a warp until it reaches its end. Rhythmic and bodily, and sometimes more aligned with daily work than image making, my practice leans into accumulation, care, and obsessively sustained acts of labor.These acts transform my studio into a space for near-prayerful making. The resulting objects hold accumulated gestures towards worship, where artmaking, process, and material act as a kind of god.