Tobin built a bronze foundry at his studio and began to cast bronze. Within a two year period, Tobin’s Earth Bronzes series was well underway, and after a well-received exhibition at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, he embarked on his most ambitious international project to date. After visiting West Africa with one of his studio assistants, who was a native of Ghana, Tobin became fascinated with the termite hills that dotted the landscape. He mortgaged his home and studio to finance the trip to make bronze castings of the insect mounds. The result was a critically acclaimed show of the Earth Bronzes, including the 32’ long Bone Wall, Forest Floor(s) and African Termite Hills at the Fuller Museum of Art in Brockton, Massachusetts. The Earth Bronzes show subsequently moved to New York and opened simultaneously at OK Harris and Arteindustrie Galleries. He also developed the fourth body of work within the Earth Bronzes series, titled Roots, which has since become his signature work. Tobin’s Earth Bronzes became a very successful traveling exhibition that commenced in New York with a yearlong show at the American Museum of Natural History. Titled Tobin’s Naked Earth, the show was de-installed on the day before the attack on the World Trade Center, September 10, 2001. It moved to Los Angeles, where it was on view for more than a year on the grounds of the Page Museum/La Brea Tar Pits and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The traveling exhibition is now divided amongst several venues, including Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis; Florida International University’s prestigious Margulies Collection; Lincoln Park in Chicago; and at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, as it awaits its most intriguing placement yet, the first ever art installation at Stonehenge Monument in England in 2007. Simultaneous to Tobin’s success with his Earth Bronzes, he returned to clay and with his exploration in scientific cause and effect, developed a sensational series he calls Exploded Clay. The process involves imbedding and detonating explosives in wet clay, which creates sculptural forms and natural glazes that are reminiscent of tidal pools and galaxies. In 2005, Tobin will install the most important work of his career, the Trinity Root, at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan near Ground Zero. The bronze sculpture, currently being made at his studio, will memorialize the tragic events of 9/11. It will be a bronze casting of the 300-year-old stump and root system of The Tree that Saved the Church, i.e. the sycamore tree that fell by the impact of the collapsing towers, and thus protected Trinity/St. Paul’s Church from falling debris. St. Paul’s Church became the official headquarters for the rescue workers at Ground Zero, and church officials have given Tobin the precious artifact to create the first 9/11 Ground Zero memorial sculpture.