Adam Mustafa is a Los Angeles-based sculptor working primarily in paper clay built over hand-shaped armatures. His work draws on biomorphic and anthropomorphic form, giving shape to figures that feel simultaneously ancient and animate, familiar in form but impossible to place.

Mustafa's process begins with material others overlook or discard. Wire, chicken wire, or recycled packing material form the structural core of many pieces, occasionally joined by salvaged objects like a lamp base found on the street, a cane, or a stool, that suggest the final form before it's even begun. Layered in paper clay and finished by hand, these armatures are transformed into figures that suggest movement, anatomy, and something not quite nameable.

The forms are drawn from the natural world, from organic shapes, the stance of an animal, the silhouette of a plant or figure. A sensitivity to texture, proportion, and light, informed by a background in architecture and photography, runs through every piece. Bold in color and tactile in surface, each piece stands on its own as something new. Each one arriving at its own identity in the making.