David Bellingham graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1991 benefiting from the presence of a number of remarkable mentors and tutors such as David Harding, Pavel Buchler, Thomas Joshua Cooper and Rodger Palmer. A noteworthy aspect of their collective influence was to encourage these young artists to become involved in artist books and publishing. Buchler's work in particular can be seen to be a model for Bellingham's determination to approach publishing as a valid artistic practice, and of his own generation, Bellingham has, more than anyone, been committed to this. In recent exhibitions he has presented a number of free publications, in the manner of Felix Gonzales Torres.

Within a prodigious output a number of ongoing projects stand out: the found ruler works, the camouflage series (with Jim Hamlyn), the landscape-based 'sections' series, and a number of works relating to rare events such as the eclipse, elections and wars. He uses text, and found and familiar objects to make concise and poetic works, often humorously inverting our pre-conceptions of these things so that we see them anew. He is particularly concerned with the ways in which we measure, quantify and categorise things.