Work: The Creation Of Adam
Terry Stringer’s The Creation of Adam moves in and out of focus. Stringer likens his sculpture to “climbing out of a valley to see another point of view”, (1) our perspective changed when we look at something with our feet planted in a different place. The Creation of Adam is inspired by the biblical story about the origin of humankind, where God creates Adam from dust and places him in the Garden of Eden. The work is almost as if we are paused in the midst of his creation, attestant to an artist who’s work consistently blurs the expression of movement and form, the real and the illusory.
Faithful to the soft forms of clay and the rhythms one can achieve in creating flowing outlines, Stringer then casts and fixes the work in bronze, finished with a wax patina. The dimensionality and handling of viewpoints pursues similar methods to those first explored by the Cubists in the early 1900’s. He offers a nod to his childhood with the depiction of a narrative, noting that when he was young he used to “stare at sepia photographs of classical art in an encyclopaedia.... So ‘Great Art’ reached down to me in New Zealand. This is the past that my sculpture remembers. We are all made whole out of the parts of our childhoods... I seek to tell my story in fragments.” (2)