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CHRISTOPHER MOULDER

Christopher Moulder's studio in Atlanta, GA has designed and executed functional works of art for over a decade.
The studio creates one of a kind sculptural lighting artworks, designed to specific sites and projects as well as a line of lighting fixtures of its own design which are made to order.
Past commissions and projects may be seen in the "ARCHIVES" section. See the "ONE OF A KIND" section for unique pieces available and the "MADE TO ORDER" section for works which can be ordered.
Christopher Moulder welcomes designer's, architect's and private collector's inquiries about sculpture designed specifically for their space and project.

BIOGRAPHY

I could never answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" But I have always wanted to be a wizard, Merlin, Prospero.

I was born and raised in Jacksonville and Amelia Island, Florida, sparkling wide rivers, hot, white, empty beaches and volatile lightning storms. My family and I spent our summers in a rickety beach house my great-grandfather built in 1908, 15 feet up in the air on stilts. Swift afternoon thunderstorms battered the beach, the house and the tourists still wandering the beach cluelessly searching for that massive shark’s tooth while lightning striking the water burst into fireballs. We would all huddle in the center of the old shack away from the windows and electrical outlets. When I could, I strayed and went outside on the front porch. I dared the lightning to strike closer and brighter as the hair on my arms stood up on end. Not for naught, the house has been struck and set aflame three times while I was there. My great-grandmother was blown across the kitchen while doing the dishes. I love electricity.

I built lots of stuff, boats and kites that dropped my bait way out at sea, airplanes, rockets and rafts out of found surfboards upon which we stood to throw cast nets to catch mullet to smoke and sell to the grocery store down the beach. We made cities in the sand underneath the house so we could then destroy them with ever greater floods and amounts of water, sand sculptures, forts…and a deadly beast made from 20’ of rope tied to a cinder block that would skim across the thin layer of water in between the ocean and the slues which we could whip a good 300 ft. down the beach. At age 12, I converted the old “Maid’s Quarters” outside the main house into my own apartment to escape my brother’s meddling hands and my mother’s “honey do” lists. Of course, I played with fire as much as I could get away with…underneath the house made of heart pine, oozing sap.

My first love is music. My first dream was to express my feelings as well as the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. Beethoven inspired me, his music was not predictable. He slaved away on it, revising again and again. I could do that. Mozart came from outer space and wrote symphonies on napkins. I couldn’t do that. But I could run my fingers through my hair in exasperation and work hard and long into the night. I have always seen things happen while listening to music, choreographed dances of moving parts and mechanisms, growing buildings, sculptures, creatures and plant forms, morphing colors and textures. It is as close to synesthesia as I can come.

I make decisions to enter buildings based on the lighting. I cannot sit in a restaurant anywhere near the fluorescent light leaks from the kitchen. I am enchanted by the short, magical time called dusk, when night begins to hemorrhage from the cracks in the sidewalks, the mortar in the bricks and from in between buildings. When I was six years old, I tried to cheat the sun by looking at its reflection in a mirror. That wasn’t really looking into the sun, as my mother had warned me about. Suddenly everything looked very complicated, super 3-D, as if I were seeing all sides of an object at once…cubist vision. A small ball of aluminum foil in the corner of the room seemed inextricably connected to the floor, which was connected to the wall, which met the ceiling and was interrupted by the windows, which led outside… The ball’s crinkled texture seemed to leak into the air around it. Its shadow held it on the floor. As I was blinking and seeing the image of the sun burned into my retina, I was sure I was going blind. My heart raced, I couldn’t breathe, I felt like I was doing somersaults and I would fall out of the armchair onto the floor. That night was the first night in my life I remember going to sleep afraid.

During one of my many breaks from college (“hiatuses” or “sabbatical” as I euphemistically explained to my parents, who were becoming ever more positive that I would never get a degree), I could be found anywhere from Mexico to Yugoslavia. In Gainesville, FL, I took a “couple” of semesters off and found employment at a furniture design and woodworking shop far out on Payne’s Prairie, underneath lazy Live Oaks. It had rained hard the night before my first day at work, so I parked my car at the gate at the entrance of the prairie and waded through shin deep dark water, seeing occasional splashes of water around me. Those were the gators. My boss taught me about menial labor, and how much a small task, when repeated well could make a difference. Never cut corners. They will be rounded over for you by things out of your control in the end. Don’t give it a head start. He became my first mentor. He held a mystical belief in woodworking. He was a poet.

I returned to the University of Florida. Because it was time to “wrap it up” as my father said, I chose to major in English, (since I was already half way there) and studied under novelist Harry Crews, a large, weathered icon of a man who wrote novels, short stories and articles for Playboy and Esquire. He has broken every bone in his body at least once (kickboxing), and was popped into a boiling vat of water at age six while playing crack the whip. He gyrated, cursed, yelled, splashed his cigarette butts about the front of the classroom and wielded needling truths about fiction and life itself… according to Harry Crews. As his arms moved about, those of us sitting in the back of the classroom who knew him well enough to be sure that we would not add to the count of our broken bones would let our faint squeaking noises; he has a strap hinge tattooed on the inside of his right arm. When we left his three-hour evening class, there was no ego left. All I could do was write it all out. I would go home, write and drink coffee all night long and miss my morning biology class. I understood fiction. Fiction is life; life is fiction, no matter what the medium, every situation an unwritten, undiscovered Haiku. We’re making it up as we go along. Subsequently, I majored in English Literature with an emphasis on short fiction writing.

I needed to know more about making things. After graduation, I moved to Freiburg, Germany and found a job at Galerie Blau, a design firm, and Massiv Moebel Bau, a furniture studio run by another mystical woodworker from Yugoslavia who believed in a design philosophy descendant from Goethe, Anthroposophism. I also learned of the German lighting designer, artist and visionary, Ingo Maurer. He became one of my most influential teachers. The two partners at Galerie Blau set up a drafting table for me and started pulling books and magazines off their shelves the likes of which I had never seen. It was at that drafting table that my writing turned to sketches, icons, hieroglyphics, schematics, three-dimensional gestures and precarious graphic situations. Music by composers from Bartok to Pink Floyd provided the architectural structure, colors, movement and texture. Through Galerie Blau's tutelage, I realized the resonance in design and architecture with human beings, how space, light, dark, form, function and objects can affect people’s lives, thoughts and emotions.

In 1991 I returned to the US and drove west… no particular destination, just somewhere else. My first stop was Boulder, Colorado. I drove down into the valley at five in the morning on my 25th birthday. A thunderstorm had just passed, the sun was just rising and the entire mountain range was brilliant crimson red. Springing from the Flatirons, enormous outcrops of rock at the west edge of Boulder were two violent rainbow spears with the violets, blues and greens removed…just glowing red wisps. I drove no further.

In Boulder, I designed furniture and made cabinets and found myself living with another designer who had fabricated a beautiful candelabrum. I followed suit and designed a candleholder made from rings of slate with a candle in the middle. After a couple of minutes, soot and wax began to coat the entire fixture. Shining a flashlight down the middle of the stack of slate, I realized this piece would be more effective with an electric light source, so I wired a low voltage MR16 lamp at the top. “Slate Fall” was my first lighting sculpture. Light became my muse and femme fatale.

I sold additional lighting sculptures to fund the next ones in my head. Many of the machined pieces were too expensive to have someone else produce, so I attended the Boulder trade school and made them myself, and I took a job with an art fabrication company. After three years of building my portfolio, I applied to The Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995 and was awarded a presidential scholarship. While on spring break, I went to the Cologne Furniture Fair and tracked down Ingo Maurer. He told me “five minutes.” He looked at my work and we discussed it for almost an hour as his anxious clients from Japan waited. He closed my portfolio and told me to do my own thing. He invited me to Munich that week and I met his design team over a round table lunch in his studio. He offered me a position as a designer, but I would have to stay with him for three years. It was a dream come true. I told him I had to finish the next nine months of school; I’d call him when I was finished. I had not talked to Ingo since that day until I saw him on the streets of New York at the 2004 ICFF. The best advice anyone has ever given me, “Do your own thing”. In the end, I just wanted him to want me. I was satisfied with the acknowledgement I had received. I intend to meet him as a peer and a competitor at the Euroluce show in Milan.

Presently, I have my studio in what used to be the cafeteria on the bottom floor of an old Telephone Factory in Atlanta, GA. When I am not playing with electricity and fire, thinking about my favorite project (always the unfinished design which is slapping the backs of my eyelids in the middle of the night) or running away to the beach house in Florida, (where there is no cell phone reception and nothing to do but sketch, read and have get togethers which, like Vegas, stay at the beach house), I am playing catch the mouse, learning ballet, building living room forts or watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with my daughter Charley. We both love Caracticus Potts.