Sculptor Matejka Bellè has for some time devoted herself exclusively to sculpting stone, which in the Karst natural environment is both ubiquitous and a universally useful material deeply entrenched in Karst folk traditions in building, stonecutting, and art.
She has studied in Australia and India, whose ancient traditions influence the artist more in a spiritual than an artistic sense.
Matejka Bellè creates her works out of doors, either enclosed within the stone walls of her characteristic Karst homestead in Kopriva or as a guest at numerous artists’ gatherings and colonies in Slovenia and abroad, where she leaves direct and recognizable traces of her creativeness, including at the international symposium Forma Viva in Seča pri Portorožu.
Stone has its own soul. Only once the artist feels it can she impart to it its unique form.
The artist’s works are imbued with an aesthetic and positive experiencing of nature in all the forms it appears in. Perhaps most specific in this connection is her view that everything that exists is beautiful, especially every person. “Are we not all beautiful?”
Ugliness and evil are therefore just the results of the mistaken and historically corrupted human experience of nature and its perversions.
The symbolism of Matejka’s sculpted creations has many meanings, but is in many respects in accord with the Indian philosophical tradition of a perpetual cyclical renewal of life in different forms, through which the soul is cleansed and progresses towards perfect spirituality and a holistic understanding of creation.
At the same time we can observe how the erotic loses its taboo. It is fundamentally a perfectly natural means of renewing life, conceived through the cooperation of the male and female principles, far removed from any western conceptualization of sinfulness.
Why would we hypocritically be ashamed of the greatest miracle of nature?
Matejka Bellè, as a poet of the Karst and of love, blends in her works the characteristics of a genius loci together with universal values in which the message of the joy of life is imparted to the observer.
Mario Berdič