Daniel Mullen

His work explores how perception is shaped—visually, emotionally, and spatially—through relationships between form, color, light, and material. He creates conditions where meaning arises through interaction: between surface and depth, between objects and their environment, between viewer and work. Grounded in a phenomenological approach, his practice attends to how perception is embodied and contingent—how it unfolds in time, shaped by movement, attention, and encounter. The viewer’s presence activates the work, forming a shared field of experience. This interest in co-authorship—where the act of looking becomes part of the construction of meaning—runs throughout his practice. This approach stems from a persistent need to orient myself—as a way of grappling with the complexities of perception, relation, and attention. These works are not illustrations of those dynamics, but a way of living with them—opening space for dialogue through material, encounter, and the shifting presence of the viewer. While painting forms the core of his work, Mullen also engages with sculpture and installation to extend these concerns into space. The rectangle recurs as a structuring element, serving both as compositional anchor and as a framework for generating depth beyond the surface. Within this constraint, rhythm and deviation, transparency and interruption, are allowed to unfold. His process is methodical but not rigid—guided by systems yet responsive to nuance, attuned to the presence of the hand, and open to optical instability. Geometry becomes a field for tension, where structure gives way to sensation. His sculptural works—using mirrored steel, wood, and porcelain—expand the perceptual logic of painting into three dimensions. These works draw the viewer into a shifting relationship with form, reflection, and space, where perception becomes unstable, embodied, and relational. Across all media, Mullen’s work opens up the conditions for perception to be experienced as dynamic, participatory, and co-constructed—less a matter of representation than of relation. What happens when seeing becomes a form of relation—something lived, unstable, and shared?