About Me

Cleo Mussi is an established and yet maverick ceramicist, drawing gestural figurative mosaics from repurposed historical ceramic tableware. Working within the folk tradition she creates contemporary, elegant, political and decorative pieces with humour and a lightness of touch. Mussi marshals inherent properties gleaned from patterns, marks, forms, colour and text into a world of narratives reflecting the time that we live in. Cleo’s pieces are in private collections world wide and in many public spaces throughout the UK. Cleo was represented at The British Ceramics Biennial in 2021 and has recently published ‘Mussi Mosaic Manufactory’ an LP size book of over 200 full colour pages representing all her projects over a career of thirty-four years.

Cleo Mussi known for her humorous twists and attention to detail as observed in her solo touring installations: ‘The Crowd’, ‘A~Z- a hand book’, ‘Pharma’s Market’-a live stock and produce show’, ‘All Consuming’, Mussi’s Herbal’ and most recently ‘Photosynthesis’. She has also completed a number of large commissions for public spaces including The John Lewis Partnership in Solihull and The BBC Asian Network in Leicester. In September of 2024 she completed a life size portrait of Greta Thunberg for the Fries International Museum of Ceramics in The Netherlands.

Cleo Mussi’s exhibitions are often large installations of up one hundred individual life size elements. Her ideas reflect environmental issues, evolution and the natural world, medicine and the impact of human consumption. The narratives within her work are reflected within the recycled ceramic that she incorporates; those that would otherwise end up in landfill. The combinations of marks and glazes as well as functional forms are combined to produce works whose content reflect historical design styles and fashions within British ceramic history. This incorporates cross cultural references from travel and commerce and represents the story of our industrial past and carbon history. Chinese ceramic meets Wedgewood, Poole sits next to Japanese porcelain and Staffordshire unites with Homebase to form a unique and motley collection of work.

Cleo Mussi is respected within the Arts both Nationally and Internationally. Originally training at Goldsmiths College, she graduated from The Textile department run by and a team of practicing artists and technicians who were knowledgeable and passionate about materials techniques and process. This quiet evolution in her working practice shows how the processes in her work have developed and matured with an obsessive emphasis on ‘Making and Materials’.