Steve Tobin, The Root

Artist Steve Tobin has said, “For me, my worship is nature and I want to create on the grandest scale that I can.” In the early 2000s, he began creating bronze casts of the actual roots of upturned trees. The most famous example of this is his Trinity Root, a cast of the stump and roots of a sycamore tree that was smashed by debris during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City. The large canopy of the seventy-year-old tree helped shield St. Paul’s Chapel, part of Trinity Church, from the blast. The sculpture was installed at Trinity Church in 2005 and subsequently moved to Connecticut.

No longer casting actual roots, today Tobin draws imagined root structures inspired by his memory of the Japanese calligraphy he saw while teaching in Japan for a year. For the artist, roots offer many powerful metaphors, including connectivity, growth, and unseen power.

Click here to read the announcement in ArtDaily.

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