Melli Ink
Melli Ink, an Innsbruck native, studied theater design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Before she moved into visual arts, she worked in theater, opera, and film, creating set designs and costumes.
As an artist, she draws inspiration from art history, literature, films, and music, and is also heavily influenced by the traditional Tyrolean art of her homeland. Her media include sculpture, often created in collaboration with glassblowers, as well as film and performance.
Melli Ink lives and works in Switzerland and Berlin.
Drawing from Hieronymus Bosch’s rich symbolic vocabulary and Buckminster Fuller’s innovative geometric design principles, Melli Ink presents her view of the world in her sculpture City of Glass. The piece sits under a glass dome and is made of glass, rose quartz, and crystal.
Old and new world views.
Hieronymus Bosch’s works were centuries ahead of their time and continue to generate discussion in contemporary art. His triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted as early as 1504, inspired City of Glass. Over 460 years after Bosch, Buckminster Fuller built the first geodesic dome as a biosphere – a world within a world. More than half a millennium after Bosch and 50 years after Buckminster Fuller, Melli Ink weaves these two ideas together. She adopts Bosch’s chaotic mixture of people, animals, plants, and architecture, but strips away his sense of bewilderment. Instead, she draws on inspiration from the grisaille utopian landscape of the exterior panels of Bosch’s triptych, which represents the third day of creation in its pure, unpopulated state. Melli Ink covers this tiny world with a dome based on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, whose structure is composed entirely of equilateral triangles. The smaller dome is a reflection of the Crystal Dome Chamber of Wonder, which is also based on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.
