Celebrated for his expansive sculptures, Steve Tobin seamlessly intertwines nature and industry using a wide range of materials, including steel, bronze, stone, glass and ceramics. With a background in theoretical mathematics and physics, his work is deeply influenced and guided by scientific principles as well as his time spent teaching in Japan. Tobin is best known for his tree-root sculptures, particularly Trinity Root, 2005, a monumental bronze work installed on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway in New York memorializing the sycamore tree that sheltered St. Paul’s Chapel on 9/11.
A Pennsylvania native, Tobin studied theoretical mathematics and physics at Tulane University and the structure of matter at the University of Pennsylvania. His science-based worldview has informed his art practice rather than traditional art-historical references. By incorporating natural forms such as tree roots and mathematical patterns into his sculptures and installations, he has created a unique body of work—in his words, “monuments to the blending of visual science practice and formal artistic expression.” For Tobin, nature as art and nature as science are one and the same.
While studying science at Tulane, Tobin’s parallel pursuit of glassblowing led him to build a glassblowing studio in Murano, Italy, and create monumental glass installations up to 30 feet high and 100 feet long, forever changing the field of glassmaking. Working in twenty countries around the world, Tobin created installations incorporating recycled materials, commenting on issues of ecology, industrial waste and humankind’s relation to the environment.
After a fifteen-year retrospective in Finland in 1993, Tobin traded glass for bronze, steel and stone, allowing him to experiment with monumentality in more traditional sculptural materials. In 2005, after completing Trinity Root, he moved from bronze works cast in his own foundry directly from nature to his Steelroots series, modernist constructions he fabricates from steel pipe recycled from the oil industry. The Steelroots series has a pared-down, metaphorical character inspired in part by Asian calligraphy. These animated, sinuous, painted steel sculptures, which range from 20 inches tall to more than 30 feet tall, evoke dancers, intertwined families and communities, and demonstrate, again, Tobin’s facility for melding organic forms with industrial materials and processes. Tobin’s intent with these root forms, he says, is to show the power of the unseen, thus changing viewers’ relationship to themselves and the natural world.
Tobin’s work has been collected and exhibited worldwide, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; White House Permanent Collection, Washington, DC; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Lausanne, Switzerland.
