Hib Sabin

artist’s statement

In 1991, after pursuing a thirty-five-year career as a painter and graphic artist, I reinvented myself as a sculptor. My early sculptural subject matter included ritual implements focused on animal imagery. Raven, owl, bear, coyote, mountain lion, and hawk became the cast of characters portrayed in my carvings and continue to be a prime source of inspiration to this day. During the first decade of this century I began to explore a broader range of subject matter based on world mythologies and spurred on by personal travel to Australia, Bali, China, Peru and Tanzania. The animal imagery I had cultivated earlier in my carving now assumed a new role, becoming surrogates for human nature and the human condition. 

2012 was a seminal year for me as a sculptor. My one-man exhibition at the Stonington Gallery, “The Journey”, was my first themed show, based on Homer’s Odyssey. I have continued to hold annual theme exhibitions of my work there, including “Silence” (2014) and “The Long Game” (2017). Now in my eighties, I am increasingly aware of the limits of my mortality. The boat image, a recurring motif in my sculpture, is a vehicle for my personal journey–a journey in which my art increasingly explores aspects of transformation–specifically transitional moments between life and death. 

For the past several years I have been drawn to poetry for inspiration. Poems by Leonard Cohen, Ted Hughes, Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot have engendered ideas for specific sculptures. The post-World War II, European Existentialist movement has profoundly influenced my creativity, especially the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti and the plays of Samuel Beckett. The certainty of mortality and the unknown-ness of immortality are ever my focus. I explore these themes in the latest exhibition of my work: The Other Side of Silence, The Far Side of Time.