MARCO BELLINI

Born in 1977, Marco Bellini lives and works in Camino, Italy. Following his studies in Classics, Bellini completed a degree in Philosophy and then worked for a time as a book editor, before completing his Masters in Computer Sciences in 2003 and working within this field for 8 years. After quitting his job, Bellini travelled to Eurasia for a year, and has been studying wood since his return. Since 2016, he has been working full time in his established studio as a wood sculptor and turner, and has representation in both Europe and the US.

Bellini describes artistic expression as a complex challenge, in that an object alone is like a word out of context: we can define its meaning but it doesn’t elicit the same emotion within us. Bellini believes his vessels work in a similar way, as relationships - the object, its context, and the viewer are all bound to relate otherwise expression or communication is not possible. In this way, his works exist in dialogue with one another. His turned wooden vessels and urns are carved to strive towards an evocation of feelings, with a sustained engagement in recalling objects from our remote past. Bellini crafts ‘cult’ objects to create a sense of the sacred, giving form to idols to inspire ancestral awe, to “free our mourning from what we’ve lost.” His objects conjure a remote time in which the sacred and profane were not separate concepts: “when a house could also be a temple, baking bread could be a ritual”. Believing this to be increasingly important in today’s world where, in the artist’s own words, ‘people suffer for this separation between science and spirituality’, Bellini hopes for his works to initiate a realisation of the inexplicable world around us in an embrace of the meaningful incompleteness of knowledge.