Kirei Vessel – Allison Mueller

38 years designing and styling interiors has firmly established Allison’s obsession with vessels and decorative ceramic forms. Allison originally trained as an interior designer with a career in freelance photographic styling and creative director for interior design magazines and advertising campaigns. Allison’s journey with ceramic art and clay began 12 years.
As a perfectionist she deliberately avoids perfectionism in her ceramic process. Almost everything she creates is within a neutral palette, shades of black and white. Allison’s works are designed to be decorative and not functional. She adds surface texture or glaze to simple wheel formed shapes. Allison loves the gritty, earthy texture of the groggy clays and her constant development of glazes always provide visual interest, matt with glossy, rough with smooth.
Allison’s primary focus is wheel forming, although her works often incorporate a combination of hand building that help to achieve organic shapes and textural elements.
Allison’s recent inclusion of weaving is an opportunity to explore mixed media and textures, using natural paper twine, jute rope, waxed string, and handmade clay beads.
Allison also creates work using raku firing where pieces are removed quickly from a hot kiln and with the extreme temperature drop the glaze cracks and the carbon from the smoke blackens the areas which are unglazed or cracked.