Yvonne Mouser is an Oakland based artist, designer, and maker whose work exists between the practical and conceptual, spanning furniture, objects, experiences, and sculpture.

Yvonne investigates ideas through the making of objects, experimenting with concepts, materials, and methods with a foundation in the traditions of a woodworking studio. She utilizes craft techniques for joining, shaping, and manipulating material to create furniture, everyday objects, and sculpture. Her work plays with technical processes like coopering, steam bending, laminating and casting. At times, actions such as grinding and burning, and accumulative assemblies allow for an intuitive approach. Driven by tactility, Yvonne explores and incorporate a range of materials from metal, glass, sand and paper, to natural fibers and composites. In her practice, craft thinking evolves through hands-on experimentation, where processes often lead to new forms and materials motivate method.

Yvonne approaches each new object-making effort as an exercise in restraint, focusing on the purity of an idea and the most direct construction methods in an attempt to achieve simplicity in the final outcome. She is interested in the layering of functionality or structure for transforming familiar objects, yielding adaptations of vernacular forms. While most objects she create are utilitarian, they function at once as implements for storytelling, and for engaging the environment. Yvonne is fascinated by our perception of natural phenomena and time, which she explores through work that suggests growth, or decay, or a sequence of temporal states or moments, teasing apart time. By combining design details with concept and intentionality in craft, her work aims to reveal the poetry in objects.

Yvonne works both independently and with a diverse group of collaborators.

Her work is included in private collections, and has been exhibited internationally and throughout the Bay Area including the SFMoMA (San Francisco), Salon Del Mobile (Milan), Center for Art in Wood (Philadelphia) San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco), the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (San Francisco), COPIA (Napa), the Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts (Alta Loma), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito).