Kate Mueller is a Los Angeles–based installation artist whose work feels like an invitation to step into another astral plane. Her large-scale sculptural forms shift perception, drawing viewers into a heightened state of awareness. Merging welding with transdisciplinary techniques, Mueller constructs immersive works that engage movement, scale, and presence, making participation central to the experience. Her sculptures are designed to be entered, circled, and encountered physically, drawing attention to the immediacy of the moment, the awe of the natural world, and the interconnectedness of all things.

Mueller employs a self-taught, highly physical process of cutting, joining, and welding positive and negative forms. Many pieces carry a functional or architectural logic, allowing large-scale installations to translate into highly collectable, stand-alone works with lasting material and conceptual presence.

Mueller’s practice is shaped by lived experience and pilgrimage: time spent in a Romanian monastery, a solo journey along the 500-mile Camino de Santiago, and the enormity of a lifetime spent on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Raised in Oxnard and based in Los Angeles since 2014, she learned to weld in her early twenties while working in a family-owned furniture shop—using the same welder to this day. Her work consistently returns to themes of shared humanity, consciousness, and what it means to inhabit a body in a specific place and time. She has realized site-specific installations throughout Los Angeles and along California’s coast.