Moving Parts

ARTIST: Lily Mueller

Lily Mueller interprets her experience of music and architectural spaces using color, pattern and composition in her hand-dyed quilts. Growing up in a color-rich, musical, and creative home, Lily forged long-standing connections between music, design, space and color. Her parents painted and remodeled her childhood home with lively colors, allowing Lily to view spaces as fluid and ever-changing. Her quilts present dream-like patterns and spaces inspired by music, vibrant color combinations and psychedelia. Lily pushes these concepts by playing with texture and using reflective fabrics such as silk and velvet to create different surfaces on her two-dimensional quilts. Through relationships between pattern and space, Lily creates constant motion in her compositions.

When making a quilt, Lily is constantly listening to music and describing her emotional (Or non-verbal) response in her quilts. She believes this to be a vital reason the composition and use of color ebbs and flows, much like a piece of music.

About the Artist

Lily Mueller is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. Mueller explores the processes of quilting, sculpture, installation and set design while integrating them with concepts of psychedelic culture, music and personal nostalgia. Much of her inspiration comes from listening to music alongside memories from her childhood. She has been largely influenced by her father’s career as an architect, his interest in psychedelic music and culture, and her mother’s love for textiles and Costa Rican heritage. Mueller is a recent recipient of a BFA in Fiber from the Kansas City Art Institute.​