Terry Stringer

The Creation Of Adam, 2017
Bronze
2300mm

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” with 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 sculpture depicts a pause in the midst of this creation, attestant to an artist whose 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 Cubist artists in the early 1900s. He offers a nod to his childhood with the depiction of a narrative, noting “when I was young I 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.”