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- Kate Mueller invites the public to experience her coffins, chamberlike porter chairs and large-scale geometric sculptures.
- “I want people to interact with them,” Mueller says of her coffin parties and beach installations inspired by Stonehenge.
The coffin, a life-size wood-and-iron box, sits in the middle of Kate Mueller’s living room as if in preparation for a wake, but its intricate details — drawers, windows, an elaborate hand-carved bronze clasp and decorative bracing along the top — hint at something more.
“I can see that it looks extremely religious,” says the 34-year-old artist and welder. “But that is not what I was going for.”
Mueller built the coffin in 2012 during her senior year at Azusa Pacific University using reclaimed wood from the theater department’s dumpster.
Like many college seniors preparing to launch into adulthood, Mueller says she was “unconsciously processing the dread of leaving school and not having a clear idea of what life would look like.”
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Creating the coffin was a deeply personal and introspective journey for Mueller. Even after 13 years, she still holds an emotional attachment to it, despite lugging it up flights of stairs and transporting it all over Los Angeles. “That is when everything clicked in furniture making for me,” she says of building the coffin. “The biggest source of joy is exploring materials and trying to push it in so many different ways.”
The unexpected use of the coffin as a coffee table adds a touch of humor. Mueller’s husband, actor-filmmaker-personal trainer Guile Branco, says they have fun with the gothic home decor. “When the cable guy came, we didn’t tell him about the coffin, and he was shocked when he walked into our living room,” he says, laughing.
“It’s a great place to store blankets and pillows,” Mueller adds.
Mueller was born and raised in Oxnard. The daughter of a pastor, she grew up in an insulated, religious family and was homeschooled. But even a pastor’s daughter can grapple with faith.
“From a very early age, I knew that what seemed to be clicking for everyone else just didn’t seem to be clicking with me,” she says.
Looking as powerful as she feels, Mueller welds steel beams for her next porter chair, which will include salvaged bamboo roots.
She tried to be religious. When she saw an online job posting to teach English to a handful of orphans and nuns in Romania, she took the position. “I think joining a monastery permitted me to move on,” she says. When the job ended, she went to Spain and walked the Camino de Santiago. “I was trying to find God,” she says of the famous pilgrimage. “I had a loving, religious upbringing, but it was complicated.”
Upon her return, Mueller moved to Los Angeles, a place that seemed “tame and reasonable” after her experiences in Romania. While working as a salesperson at a small family-run furniture store, she learned to weld and sharpen her building skills during off hours.
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“I had been a woodworker and building things for two years, but learning how to weld was a gift,” she says. “You can build much grander things and make them stable and safe. It made me feel very powerful.”
When the store closed in 2019, the owners gave her the welder and assorted building materials. While working at her next job as a project manager for another artist (that gig ended this month), Mueller started welding in her backyard in Van Nuys.
The couple’s home is filled with Mueller’s photographs and furnishings, including stools made with reclaimed wood, side tables made from wood cutoffs and an A. Lietz Co. antique drafting table base with a top she reimagined with inlaid wood. And of course, the coffin-turned-coffee table.
Mueller’s chamber-like porter chairs are designed as a place where the viewer can be alone and meditate. “I like the idea of creating a space in which you would continually feel safe, no matter where you are,” she says.
Her high-backed porter chair, a chamberlike structure, features a mirrored kaleidoscope roof that offers the viewer Kusama-esque infinity patterns when seated inside. The chair, with its intricate design and meditative purpose, emphasizes Mueller’s ability to create unique, immersive experiences.
Sitting inside the porter chair, which references the constellations and specifically the brightest star, Sirius, has a meditative quality and is a different experience for everyone. “That’s the magic of the mirrors,” says Mueller. “That’s why mirrors are tied to other astral planes in many different cultures — they transport you to another place.”
With the help of Branco, Mueller recently started installing large-scale welded steel geometric sculptures on beaches in Oxnard, Santa Monica and, most recently, Dockweiler State Beach. For each installation, she invites the public to come and experience the sculptures and observe the way they frame the ocean and interact with the tide.
When Mueller was growing up, her parents would open their home to whoever needed a place to stay during the holidays. “So over the years, our house has become a place where we host people on Thanksgiving and Christmas,” she says. “When Thanksgiving was approaching this year, it seemed like the best gift for anyone coming to our house was to go outside. So I made a picnic and invited everyone to come to Santa Monica and experience my installation.”
To their surprise, so many strangers on the beach interacted with the sculptures on Thanksgiving that they weren’t able to leave until after dark.
“People were having fun,” Branco says. “It’s nice to think that Kate’s sculptures will end up in someone’s family photos.”
Mueller describes the interactive beach installations as “a love letter to humanity and nature.” Some people walk through them. Others take selfies as the sculptures frame the sunset. A few have tried to do pullups. Ultimately, however, the installations are about connection.
“They are meant to create a sense of community through our collective awe of nature,” Mueller says. “It emphasizes how we are all connected. Humans have been gathering in nature and sharing rituals since the beginning of time.”
Experiencing the constant interplay of shapes and groups in person can throw you off balance, according to her friend and mentor, artist Leslie Lanxinger. “The thing I love about Kate’s work is that from a distance, her structures are beautiful, but when you get close, step inside her installations, there is a disconcerting feeling,” says Lanxinger. “Kate has an incredible sensitivity with respect to her materials and the surroundings she chooses, and you feel a connection deep inside your body when you interact with her work.”
Looking to the future, Mueller dreams of installing her steel-frame sculptures along the California coastline, a project she’s dubbed “The String of Life That Connects All Things.” She also plans to continue making coffins.
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Over the years, she has hosted several “coffin parties,” where she invites guests to lie in the coffin and contemplate their mortality. At her last event, which referenced the Buddhist practice of maraṇasati, or a mindfulness meditation on death, people waited in line to experience the coffin.
“Kate is such a unique artist in the way that her creations have the ability to connect you with something more,” death doula Jill Schock said by email. The two hosted a coffin party together in September and Mueller is open to hosting private coffin parties for others. “Whether that’s your mortality through her handmade coffins or the humbling aspects of nature through her delicate frames on the beach, her work is truly spiritual.”
Mueller welds steel in her Van Nuys backyard.
Mueller’s next porter chair will have a crown of gnarled bamboo roots she found on the beach in Oxnard. “There will be Plexiglas, so if you’re sitting inside, you’ll cast light and shadows that interact with the environment.”
Beyond that, she sees the future in a constant state of flux. “You can count on everything to change,” she says in between welding and sanding a steel frame in her backyard. It’s a statement that fills her with hope as much as anxiety. “I like thinking of those words as an antidote to my anxious mind,” she adds quietly.
In talking with Mueller, she repeatedly uses the word “gift” to explain her artistic path, perhaps partly because seeing people interact with her work has touched her profoundly.
“I’ve never had people thank me for my art before, and that’s what happened to me with these installations,” she says. “I like the idea of creating a space where you would continually feel safe, no matter where you are. I want to leave that to posterity.”
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