How much do you think a person is worth?
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

How much do you think a person is worth?

I wrote this text in response to a series of questions from artist Susan Aldworth’s project “The Value of a Human”. I struggled with the question “How much do you think a person is worth?” until, in one quick flow, this brief essay poured out.

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Reflecting on an image
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

Reflecting on an image

In preparing for an upcoming talk, I’ve been thinking a lot about this image. My mastectomy and reconstructive surgery was a just month away when I finally had my hospital “before” photos taken. I’d canceled twice…

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Deleterious
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

Deleterious

Deleterious… My BRCA test results letter was my induction into the world of the “worried well”. I was not ill, but was suddenly living in the world of the infinitesimally small – my own DNA cast a shadow over everything I was and knew…

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Seeing into the soul of a woodland
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

Seeing into the soul of a woodland

I live a short walk from the Hackney Marshes and the tiny Wick Woodland, and one of the beautiful, unpredicted results of being here under lockdown is that I have fallen in love with this vast green space near my house…

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Imagining your death
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

Imagining your death

I’ve been playing with images of my dad to learn a bit of Photoshop. He died in 2007, but not a day goes by that he is not in my thoughts. I don’t have a religious faith, but sometimes I still feel that he is still alive in some way...

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Mantra for the dead
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

Mantra for the dead

In 2017 on a residency in Italy, I made cyanotypes from star maps. Well, they made themselves really, I just provided the materials and helped them along. Right away I knew I wanted to do something large, so laid out a grid of 9 squares, sections of stars from across the sky…

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Artist’s residency at THECUBE
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

Artist’s residency at THECUBE

I’ve been interested in how we process emotion: how it is situated within the body, how we recognize it in ourselves and others, and how that recognition can transform us…

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CERN’s large hadron collider
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

CERN’s large hadron collider

I didn’t go to CERN with the idea that what I learned about physics would feed directly into the artwork I am doing focused on genetics and mutation—but I was open to finding connections…

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See Me Through This in the FT
Jill Mueller Jill Mueller

See Me Through This in the FT

The phrase “POSITIVE FOR A DELETERIOUS MUTATION” still hung in the air as I clicked off the phone. All caps. The way I’d later see it written on the official test results…

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