Born in Heerlen in The Netherlands Mestrom came to Australia via New Zealand as a 17-year-old. She studied fine art at RMIT, graduating with honours in 2000, and went on to do a PhD thesis on the power of place and the politics of perception which she completed in 2008. A Graduate Certificate in Public Art followed in 2011. She was appointed senior lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts (Sculpture), University of Sydney, in 2019. Mestrom shifted her focus towards an examination of spatial and sculptural properties in 2009, with wall drawings that used pictorial and optical illusion to challenge the act of perception. In 2013 she produced a series of ceramic works that used Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings of bottles and jars as source material for a work that considered his meditations on light, line and objects in three dimensions. For Mestrom, this is a strategy of playing with the language of the modernist period through a postmodern lens, questioning the value of authorship, originality and mastery by using methods of replication and repetition.