As an artist, Muller has spent the past year and a half delving more deeply: the needs to break new ground and find a new visual language led her to experiment with different media, while maintaining the commonality of use of the self-portrait. The outcome of this exploration is twenty small paintings and a series of short films, with trauma and healing as underlying theme.
Muller's first major solo exhibition at the Drents Museum closed in September 2021. The following month an exhibition on the work and life of Frida Kahlo, Viva la Frida, opened. During that exhibition, Muller spent a short period working as artist in residence at Studio DM, the museum's residency programme. Muller visited the exhibition about the artist almost daily. These encounters with Kahlo's work were an important influence in the creative process that followed.
Remarkable similarities can be found between the work of Kahlo and Muller. Kahlo's famous quote ‘I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best,’ could have been Muller's. Muller uses her own face to give form to different characters, emotions and mindsets. As she explains in her own words, ‘...by placing my face on each figure, I'm no longer an individual and am, in fact, painting everyone or playing with the idea that I can be or could have been anyone and am no different from anyone else. By using my own face in the scene I construct, I don't have to answer to anyone.’