Morbillo's sculpture rests on a sustained dialogue between two distinct ways of looking at form, the architect's, which sees structure, joint, and load, and the geologist's, which sees fracture, erosion, and the long slow work of natural force, and the resulting work is recognizably the product of an artist who has spent his life in close practical contact with both.
Morbillo's path into sculpture moved through several distinct phases of practical training. His first medium was ceramics, which gave him an immediate, tactile understanding of the structural behaviour of materials under stress, and his discovery of metal during a winter forge session at Alfred University opened a parallel set of working possibilities. The years he subsequently spent in the building trades after graduation extended that practical knowledge into the broader vocabulary of construction, frame, joint, weld, and the everyday demands of structural integrity, and the experience underlies the architectural sensibility evident in his later sculpture.
The decision to pursue graduate study at the University of Montana brought him into a different relationship with the western American landscape. The arid geology of the inland West, with its visible stratification, weathering, and large-scale erosion, became the second pole of his sculptural thinking, set against the urban architectural traditions in which he had grown up. The combination of these two reference points, built form and weathered landform, has remained the central tension of his work.
His move to Santa Fe gave that work the technical and professional context it needed. The Shidoni Art Foundry, where he began working immediately on his arrival, was at the time one of the most important sculpture foundries in the United States, and his years there gave him a sustained working knowledge of bronze casting, fabrication, and the practical management of large-scale public sculpture. The foundations of his mature practice, bending and twisting flat steel and bronze and then welding them into seamless three-dimensional forms, often working from small studies up to towering finished works, were laid during this period.
The body of work that has developed since explores natural forces of entropy and change as much as it does any single subject. He sets smooth fabricated surfaces against torn and rougher elements, producing sculpture that registers the action of geological time on built form, or, equivalently, the persistence of human-made structure within a landscape that is ceaselessly remaking itself.
His public commissions across the United States have placed his work in civic, medical, library, and university settings, and his gallery exhibitions in Santa Fe, Taos, Dallas, and California have built a steady regional and national audience for the studio work. He continues to live and work in Santa Fe, where his career belongs both to the long history of New Mexican sculpture and to the broader contemporary American tradition of abstract metalwork.