Most artists title a work after what it resembles or what it means. Hervé Sabin titles his after a postcode — the code of the street where he found the wood. Line the pieces up and you do not get a series of images; you get an itinerary. Port-au-Prince, Montreal, Miami, New York. A body of work that is also a record of where its maker had to be.
Sabin was born in Pòtoprens and made his first objects out of nothing in particular: kites, and footballs improvised from condoms and tights bound with string — the standard curriculum of a childhood with imagination and no budget. He left for New York in 1989, studied architecture at the New York Institute of Technology and then at Pratt, and spent two decades in the city's practices. In 2010, after the earthquake, he went home and founded Studio Drum Collaborative in Port-au-Prince, working across architecture, furniture, urbanism and rural education. In the spring of 2025 the deteriorating security in the capital forced him to close the studio; he worked between Miami, New York and Montreal. Earlier this year he went back again.
Sèvi-Tè
The series that placed him among the thirty finalists of this year's LOEWE Craft Prize — chosen from more than five thousand entries across 133 countries, and the only Caribbean practice on the list — is called Sèvi-Tè. In Haitian Creole the phrase folds together sèvis, service, and tè, land; said aloud it also sounds sèvitè, a servant — in Vodou, one who serves the spirits. Service to the ground and service to what the ground holds, in a single word. Some of the vessels have gone to live on home altars rather than plinths, which is the most honest test a functional object can face.
Letting the termites decide
The wood is salvaged, gathered on the move. The process is slow and physical: carving, charring, sanding, waxing, then waiting — pieces can sit for more than a year before he calls them finished. Even the charring dust is kept, mixed with used coffee grounds and glue into a composite. Nothing is wasted, in the manner of someone who learned early that materials are not infinite.
And he shares authorship with the insects. “Sometimes you let the termites do their own thing,” he says — a sentence worth sitting with. Termites are what wood-carvers fight; here they are collaborators whose galleries and voids become part of the form. It is the same instinct that makes Darcey Fleming weave with what farmers throw away or Kobina Adusah accept the crack in the clay: the material is not a passive surface to be conquered but a party to the negotiation.
Not resistance. Existence.
There is a template waiting for a story like this — the artist heroically defiant against catastrophe — and Sabin declines it. He describes his continuity as coming “not out of resistance, but out of existence”. The distinction is not modesty. Resistance takes its shape from what it opposes; existence simply carries on making, and lets the circumstances register in the work as they actually arrived: in the grain of a plank picked up on a particular street, in the postcode that becomes a title.
Deyan Sudjic, who has spent a career looking at objects, said Sabin's work tells profound stories about time and place. It does — but not by depicting them. A charred bowl from a street in Montreal, another from a lot in Pòtoprens: put them side by side and the story is already told, in wood, without a single word about leaving.