Marco Bellini 'Euthanatos' (19)
Dimensions: H 14cm x Ø 25cm
Materials: Locally sourced walnut wood
Method: Wood is hollowed out at the lathe, buried underground for 2-6 weeks with plats, ashes, acids and other elements. Once they are extracted, they are washed, sanded, sandblasted, bleached and partly finished with beeswax. As the process is complex, the artist decides which steps to skip depending on the character of each vessel after its burial.
Care: To clean, dust lightly with a cotton cloth
Description
Euthanatoi is a series of vessels shaped on the lathe and then buried in living soil for several weeks, alongside plants, ashes, acids, and other organic elements. During this time underground, the wood transforms: marked by the unpredictable forces of decay, weather, and chemistry. Each piece emerges altered, bearing traces of its temporary entombment. The process embraces surrender and chance, resulting in objects that feel both aged and reborn. Named after a narrative-based game, Euthanatoi references rites of passage and the cycle of death and renewal, where play, process, and transformation intertwine.
About the Artist
Marco Bellini lives and works in Camino, Italy. 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’s 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.
