CAT MUELLER
(2016)
Cat Mueller’s practice bounces between vibrant acrylic paintings, dense fluorescent paint-marker drawings, craft and installation using plastic dollar store items. Her high-key work investigates intense colour relationships and optical effects in order to create visual movement and an energetic viewing experience. Mueller’s large-scale acrylic paintings were developed through additive craft processes and meditative drawing techniques. Her aesthetic is informed by an interest in online culture, childhood playfulness, 1990s kitsch, femininity, psychedelia, cult craft crazes and natural phenomena from microbes to sunsets.
During her residency at Canberra Contemporary Art Space she will continue to expand upon her repetitive painting technique and systems of modulating colour to activate pictorial space. An increase in scale will give a more physical reading of the optical devices operating within her paintings and surround the viewer’s peripheral vision. Her new work will look at the subtleties of colour shifts and soft alterations in a pattern of colours, or ‘systematic gradients’, mixing new colours within the eye as did the Pointillists.
CV
EDUCATION
2015 Bachelor of Visual Art Honours (First Class), Australian National University School of Art
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2016 Hatched: National Graduate Show 2016, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth
2015 ANU School of Art Graduating Exhibition, ANU SofA, Canberra
2015 Chatter, M16 Artspace, Canberra (solo)
2015 Past Perfect, Leta Gallery + Project Space, Canberra 2015
2015 sPIN, ANCA Gallery, Canberra
2014 M16 Drawing Prize, M16 Artspace, Canberra (Winner)
2014 ANU School of Art Drawing Prize, ANU SofA Foyer Gallery, Canberra (Winner)
2014 Divergence, Nishi Gallery, Canberra
SELECTED AWARDS AND PRIZES
2015 EASS Canberra Contemporary Art Space Russell Kennedy Lawyers Studio Residency Award
2015 EASS Inaugural Margaret Munro Prize
2014 ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences Honours Scholarship