Hib Sabin's wood sculpture is focused mainly on animal imagery - raven, owl, bear, coyote, mountain lion and hawk - as it relates to human nature and the human condition. The roots of his sculpture are to be found in Shamanism, the mythologies of world cultures and more recently in modern poetry and philosophical movements such as Existentialism. The subject matter of his early carvings are of Shamanic ritual implements: healing wands, soul retrievers, talking sticks, dancing sticks and especially masks. Gradually, after extensive travels across the globe, he began to explore a number of the world's rich mythologies and his subject matter moving beyond the realms of Shamanism, but always using the prism of animal imagery. Since 2008, his inspiration has come from many sources, including European Existentialist theory, and modern poets such as Leonard Cohen, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas. The structure of the book is broken down into three segments: the exploration of Hib's roots in Shamanism; the expansion of his vision into a larger more global mythic universe; and an analysis of the themes that have driven his creative process in recent years.
