Being able to elicit a reaction from an audience is the most important thing that a sculpture or piece of public art can do. These reactions can be positive or negative and they can cover the entire emotional spectrum. While all artists are focused on enabling such reactions, few have been able to do so like sculptor Michael Esbin, whose pieces elicit these types of responses but do so in a way that connects audiences to something far more fundamental.
Esbin’s sculptures deal with the ideas related to form and space and also with the nature of time itself. His pieces are exclusively his creations as the planning, designing, carving and finishing are operations he carries out himself. That connection to the process has allowed him to highlight especially profound themes related to transformation and human connection that can span entire lifetimes.
This connection to the process can be seen in pieces like “Sunya”, which is made from Belgian black marble. Esbin has talked about how his aspirations are to create images that reveal Nature in all its beauty and complexity. That process of revelation is one he went through in a very literal way as he transformed what was a large chunk of inelegant marble into “Sunya”, which reveals as much about stone as it does about how audiences can connect with such pieces.
“Stone is truly a living substance, since it is the fundament and matrix which binds the earth together in a great unity,” Esbin has said. “It is at once commonplace, yet it is potent and magical in many ways.”
That magic is realized in terms of how his pieces enable a view of the world that gives audiences a whole new appreciation of their place in it. As an example of what that appreciation can look like, consider something like “Boundless”. This piece made of red Persian travertine has an appealing aesthetic, but there’s something much more to it that draws in the viewer. Some it has to do with the negative space in the center of “Boundless”, but the appeal is more about the piece’s similarity to an infrared view of the Milky Way galaxy. The Galactic core is obscured in visible light by intervening dust clouds, but just as the infrared camera reveals the hidden truth, sculptures like “Boundless” do the same to provide audiences with context around what this truth means to them and their place in the universe.
Similarly, “Birth of a Wave” is appealing on a purely aesthetic level, but there’s so much more for viewers to engage with and explore. Made of statuario marble, the smoothness of the sculpture is juxtaposed with frequent sharp angles and curves, mimicking physical waves but also connected to the fundamental transport of energy without the transport of matter that waves represent.
That same type of connection to fundamental concepts is something others have documented in great detail for Esbin’s pieces like “Tibetan Sun.” The block of blue quartzite from Brazil is swirled into a dynamic flow, transforming one of the hardest natural stones into a shape that enables inner and outer peace. It is meant to be an icon of the transformation of the global culture into a true civilization.
Esbin’s body of work is something that has been referenced as being as ingenious as it is elegant, much of which is on account of how his pieces are tied to these deeper themes without explicitly emphasizing them. Sculptures of all types have become icons that represent entire cities or concepts, but Esbin’s sculptures have come to showcase how important these deeper connections can be to audiences and the places where these pieces are installed. In creating pieces that explore the phenomenon of the flow of time and deal with concepts like eternity and universality, Esbin highlights what it can look like for an artist to create a dialogue between people and art that investigates some of the deepest truths of existence.
In becoming icons for concepts like global transformation and a connection to eternity, Esbin’s sculptures have set a new expectation around the types of questions and conversations that sculptures and pieces of public art can elicit. They can directly enable connections between individuals and entire communities on a whole new level to open up opportunities in the present and the future.
To learn more about the work of Michael Esbin, visit his site, www.michaelesbin.com
To get in touch with him, send him an email at: m.esbin@tiscali.it