Every morning, Claire Mueller draws a line down the middle of a notepad: My Stuff on one side, Money Stuff on the other. Without the line, these things can easily meld into a psychic substance that is effortful to wade through. She wryly cited her terrible memory: “I need external reminders that it’s okay for me to keep these things clearly separated.”
There’s Claire Mueller, professional creative, and then ACID.FLWRS as a distinct brand. “They live with different websites, different portfolios, different socials, and all of that,” she said. “One day I’m on set, one day I’m doing site visits, one day I’m at the flower market, one day I’m doing textile design.” As ACID.FLWRS has developed, she’s spent more time on it and there’s been crossover into other work. She highlighted the necessity of this: “You need that momentum; you need to be showing what you’re doing in order to get the next opportunity.”
Seed the Origin
“The resource was the knowledge that I had.”
– Claire Mueller
ACID.FLWRS wasn’t the product of a grand plan, but Mueller credited the growth of her creative work to her professional creative career. “I have a lot of experience working in brand communications and advertising content, I know how social works, I know how PR works,” she said. “I knew that I could get it out there without that much resource. The resource was the knowledge that I had.” Or, plainly: “I can use the system. And if I hadn’t spent time doing commercial work and brand work for other people, I wouldn’t know how to apply that to my own thing.”
She wasn’t proprietary in her conversation with me, and freely shared her process, successes, foibles and rationale: “I sent lots of flowers to artists and creatives and people that I respected and admired… there was a lot of organic sharing from that, which really helped get it beyond my immediate network.” For a while the medium itself did the work. “Because it’s a visual thing and it was a novelty, it was quite easy to put fairly low-touch content out there.”
The resulting growth has to be tended to with a little more elbow grease, and Mueller was as sure-minded as ever when she discussed her vision, and was realistic about her self-knowledge, saying that her personality isn’t one that naturally gravitates to camera-in-face and look-at-this-minutiae! In a way, I find that more compelling. With how close we all are to each other online (parasocially or otherwise), it invigorates the imagination to have those details withheld. The curtain stays drawn until it’s showtime, because we don’t always need to see the set being built to participate in the experiencing of art.
MUELLER'S CREATIVE HEARTBEAT
The Creative Heartbeat exercise funnelled her toward a mode of thinking that is usually subconscious for most creatives. Or rather, something we’d likely not draw out of ourselves without provocation. “Having to be a bit self-reflective and be like, ‘How do I actually feel about my work?’ is always an interesting question,” she said. What it revealed was how fastidiously she adhered to the split we discussed earlier, where she’d managed to figure out a system that is complementary and sustainable. I took a lot of notes during our conversation, and wondered momentarily whether Claire Mueller had maybe figured out quantum entanglement, such is her mastery of this divide. Not to say it was easy, because what’s easy and what’s worthwhile? Of the divide, Mueller said, “I find myself sitting in these two different spaces. One is very artistic and the practice that I feel is self-driven, it’s my brand, it’s my baby… And then I also live and work in Sydney as a professional creative.”
AND MORE GOOD ADVICE
I asked her what tolls she’d paid along this road. “I was carrying heaps of anxiety and was always stressed about it.” What she learned took many years as a creative professional, working for others. “The piece that I’m doing doesn’t always have to be something that’s changing the world,” she said, and relinquishing that idea freed her: “That allows me to go wild with my ideas and just do what I want… I’m not exhausted from a space where it’s less forthcoming.” Most attempts to impose one’s creative will in the commercial domain will be embarrassed, and enough of these experiences will burn you out, curdle your kindness, make you a little closed off, and worst of all, can dim the light that drove you to that kind of wild-eyed creation in the first place. You don’t wanna stay there. Everyone gets singed, but don’t allow yourself to be charred.
What the commercial world does to its own is fairly predictable when looking at it from a privileged position: the rear-view. When you’re getting into it for the first time, you can’t see shit. “There are so many people who I’m sure at a point in time were excited and exciting creatives,” Mueller said, “but they get put into offices and none of their work is ever about research or ideation, it’s just about pumping out work that quickly feels meaningless.” The machinations of the industry are obvious to the more experienced, and it’s easy for one to conclude a cynical view is most accurate, but this is something Mueller happily diverges from, and I was happy to see it through her eyes.
“80 percent and out the door.”
– Claire Mueller
While it is exhausting to spend years trying to ram a square peg into a round hole, the futility of it and its endless nature contain its own disciplined beauty. If one can disentangle their self-conception as an artist from the activities they engage in to pay the rent, they can quite serenely continue trying to ram that square peg into that round hole, because they know it’s not the be-all end-all. “There is a lot of just kind of waste, a lot of entropy, and a lot of money and time and ideas spent on things that don’t really make that much impact when they could be amazing.” This would frustrate anyone, but it can also inspire anyone to do it better. For Mueller, the structural view remains true: “the framework of the agency brand world perpetuates this busywork and can drain people unbelievably fast.”
Her advice was to try not to take it to heart. “Now I look at that system as what pays my rent, rather than where my best creative work will happen, I’ve divorced from it emotionally.”
Mueller spent a significant amount of time in startup land, and said it gave her what the creative industry hadn’t, which was a rope-ladder out of the perfectionist pit — the ability to kick things out the door half-dressed, or rather, mostly dressed. “80 percent and out the door,” she said. “Then see what happens, assess and adjust and try again.” Which brings us to one of Mueller’s more indelible quotes:
"IT'S JUST DUDES IN A ROOM"
“Life is short, if you’re not doing the thing that you care about now, there might not be a later.”
“Identify what you actually care about. What are your values? What makes you happy?” Mueller’s description of the stakes is blunt: “Life is short… if you’re not doing the thing that you care about now, there might not be a later.” She also had words for those intimidated by the hierarchies of success, independent of industry: “Everything is just dudes in a room. No one in a position of power is really all that magical or all that much smarter.”
Mueller’s hindsight is something I believe should be laser-engraved into every creative newbie’s optic nerve: “There were a lot of ideas that I had in my early creative life that I thought would be cool to do but didn’t have the confidence to do them properly. Five years later, I’d seen so many signs that doing that specific thing would have been amazing.” So when you’ve got it, do it and don’t wait for someone to say GO.
NEXT UP
This year for ACID.FLWRS has been purposefully less defined than the last few years. Mueller said she’s taking the opportunity to work on something she’s been wanting to do for a long time. Along with that, she’s experimenting: “I’m exploring ways to evolve the work that I do with AF into forms that are less perishable. I was trained in fashion design, so I come from that world of not quite graphic, not quite art, somewhere in the middle.”
Asked if there was anything else she wanted on the record, she said, “My creative wave through life has been utterly non-linear. There’s no perfect pathway, but I’d say that figuring out how to trust yourself is the greatest advantage you could give yourself. So go for it, 80 percent and out the door!”
