Hib Sabin’s Final Exhibition

Stonington Gallery • Seattle, Washington

The show running September 3-26th at the Stonington Gallery has an unusually blunt title: “Hib Sabin’s Final Exhibition.” It’s a statement so simple and direct you wonder if you missed something. Sabin’s Final exhibition? Really? Say it ain’t so! 

Sabin’s relationship with the Stonington Gallery has lasted nearly a quarter of a century, in which time he’s had fifteen solo shows. That’s a remarkable rate of production for any artist, and that rate has not fallen off with age. In fact, Sabin’s previous solo show at Stonington was just last year. Its title, “Raven and the Cast of Characters Bid You A Fond Farewell,” foreshadowed the finality of this September’s show. To echo one of Sabin’s favorite poets, Dylan Thomas, the sculptor appears to be going gently into that good night, contemplating the life cycle with curiosity and acceptance. Or at least that’s the impression one gets from the artwork itself.

Now 91, Sabin’s longevity is in the model of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keeffe, two artists who remained artistically active into their 90s. They did that not by constant reinvention but by continually refining approaches they’d established decades earlier. Sabin, Martin, and O’Keeffe also have something else in common: each artist uprooted to Northern New Mexico in mid-life, and took their creativity in entirely new directions. It was in Santa Fe that Sabin took up whittling and then carving; his medium of choice was the native juniper that thrives in the high-desert landscape. It’s as if the land itself spoke through these artists. 

Sabin’s work resonates so well at the Stonington in part due to Sabin’s deep interest in world mythologies and shamanism. In particular he responds to the mythic figures present in Indigenous Northwest Coast artwork, and in oral traditions, Raven being the prime example. The influence of some Inuit artists is visible in his work, too, with its economy of form, strong silhouettes, and minimal detail.

Sabin has in the past immersed himself in diverse Indigenous communities around the globe, studying (and practicing) shamanistic procedures with the Hadza people of Tanzania, with Indigenous Australian peoples, and with curanderos in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Having spent years as an art historian in academic settings, Sabin has an experiential and intellectual grasp of how archetypal figures arise in widely different periods and places. In Ancient Greece, Raven is allied to the god Apollo, and in Norse mythology to the god Odin, who is usually depicted with two ravens. Sabin himself sometimes pairs ravens together in his work: in “Raven Spirit Rising,” he painted one raven black and the other white; in “The Offering” he depicts one raven alive and one dead. In “White Raven Dreams of His Brother” one raven is carved inside the other (whether that counts as two ravens or one is a nice ambiguity).

Owls too make frequent appearances in Sabin’s world. One of the stronger pieces in the new show, “Dreamers,” is unusual in that it pairs a raven with an owl in opposite ends of a boat, each turned away from the other. More often the owl stands in solitude. It seems relevant that several Northwest coastal nations consider the owl to be a conveyor of ancestral messages. In “Still of the Night,” Sabin presents an owl craning its neck and tilting its head ever so slightly, as if to get better reception for an in-coming message. Whether the message is from an ancestor or from some predator or potential mate is uncertain.

Other winged creatures, both birds and bats, become the focus on rarer occasion. There’s the raptor-as-vessel in “Small Vessel for Fleeting Thoughts and Hawk Vision.” In “Coming Home,” a bald eagle enfolds an older gentleman in its dark wings, as to say an abiding spirit attends the bodily self, and perhaps survives it.

One last visual motif to highlight is the row boat present throughout Sabin’s work. When figures occupy the boat, the suggestion is that they are passengers on a voyage. As such they are neither here nor there but rather betwixt and between realms. But in pieces such as “Small Vessel for Old Memories and Raven Dreams II,” the animal merges into or even becomes the vessel itself. Here again the imagery has a mythic, timeless quality. For as long as humans have constructed boats, they have carved animal forms into the bow, as if to wish for the animal’s guidance and hunting prowess. Nautical odysseys promise profound spiritual transformation—it has always been so, from the incredibly ancient Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories right up through Christopher Nolan’s latest film. 

Each figure Sabin carves is imbued with individuality, and to take them as mere stand-ins for an archetype or other abstraction is to miss an important personal quality. This artist may depict spirit animals but it’s always the human condition he’s exploring. Many collectors see their own condition reflected in Sabin’s carvings. And we trust that this sort of seeing and connecting will continue to occur, even if this really is, in the end, Sabin’s final exhibition.

Tom McDonald

Tom McDonald is a writer and musician living on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Stonington Gallery, located at 125 South Jackson Street in Seattle, Washington, is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturday from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. “Hib Sabin’s Final Exhibtion” is on view through September 26. For more information, please visit www.stoningtongallery.com