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ADAM MULDER

SAN ANTONIO

I use natural forms as a metaphor for human experience. Nature forms and transforms
through external and internal stimuli much like the way human personality traits and
emotional identity form through our daily encounters with hardship and blessing.
Similar to the way nature needs external stimuli and internal reactions to transform into
its intended final form, humans also need this action to reaction process to form beliefs,
values, character, and identity.

Many of the seemingly insignificant occurrences in our lives can have significantly
powerful effects on the formative processes that lead to the eventual outcome of our
psyche. We often do not realize or understand the effects these stimuli have had
upon our psyche until they have already taken hold. Life cycles in nature are similar
to human psychological and physiological development. Think of a seed as a specific
stimuli and the interpretation and evaluation of how we let that stimuli change us.
Bundle that seed together with thousands of others and you will have a forest that
makes up the whole of our experience which informs who we are.

My work is intended to make the viewer question their own experience. By using
natural forms that seem familiar to most, but strangely different, I hope the viewer will
question what their own reality is and whether or not their experience is true. Humans
have a simultaneously wonderful and terrible ability to lie to themselves. We often will
remember things differently than they actually happened.

That being said, most of my work addresses a personal experience and the struggle
I have with what actually occurred. Each work is an expression of emotion, memory,
or experience that I have had in my own life. For example, my sculpture Faith is the
physical form of a childhood memory. I grew up attending a church that had several
large maple trees around its parking lot. While I may not remember much about the
service, or what I was supposed to learn from going to church, I do remember going
out after the service with other children and playing in the piles of “helicopters” that had
fallen from the trees.