Steve Mueller

Stephen Mueller was born in Joliet, IL in 1952.  From the ages of 8 to 20 he lived in Switzerland, Germany and Australia.  He returned to America in 1972 to attend the John Herron School of Art where he studied with Gary Freeman and received his BFA in 1976. He received his MFA in Sculpture from the University of Illinois in 1978. 

 

After graduating he moved to Chicago to co-found Vector Custom Fabricating, Inc., a company that specializes in the fabrication of architectural metals and monumental sculpture.  Over the last 32 years Vector has worked with many artists on their larger projects – among them Martin Puryear, Mike Baur, Terrence Karpowicz, Bruce White, Christine Rojek, Neil Goodman, Donald Gummer, Stephen Luecking, John Himmelfarb, John Van Alstine, Vito Acconci and Inigo Manglano-0valle.

 

Since a trip in 2007 to the Kimberley region of Australia I have been working with a variety of ochres, from white to yellow, orange, red, brown to black,  the color of each depending on the impurities of the individual mineral oxide.  In addition to Australian ochres I use earth pigments mined in France, Italy, Germany, America and India.  I add water and a little binder to the dry pigments and work on heavy weight water color paper; found paper (books) and polypropylene.  The water based medium allows the different pigments to exhibit their own characteristics, their own fingerprint, like flow and patterns of reticulation.  The way different pigments meet, mix or establish a border is unpredictable.  An elemental form, the arch or mound, constitutes the composition, the identity of each work emerging as much from the physics of the process as the hand of the artist.

 

The Mousseau Books   2008 – 2009
Natural Earth Pigments (Ochres) on Found Paper.  The ‘found’ paper is five High School exercise books of Emily J. Mousseau dating from 1884 to 1886; purchased at a flea market in Charleston, South Carolina in 2004.  This collaboration of two person’s mark making is the result of a process come full circle: her marks an imposed discipline of repetition (learning by rote); mine a voluntary meditation on a single shape.  The name of the books and details come from words found on the page.

 

St. Paul Boxes  2009
Natural Earth Pigments (Ochres) on Found Paper.  The ‘found’ paper is three Teacher Grade Books from the small Indiana town my father’s family came from.  Boxes of these grade school records survived the town’s historian and family friend Bob Mitchell.  I chose from those designated to be thrown out.  They date from the 1920s except the one Road Tax from 1864.  Like the Mousseau Books the titles come from words found on the pages.