Artist Statement

In an age that races to generate, I work with what has been forgotten.

The materials I work with, worn wood, pages from old books, punched cards from the textile industry, rusted metal, have all lived before they reach me. I do not search for them; they find me. Imperfect, eroded, and discarded, they carry quiet traces of use, of touch, of loss. By giving them a new life, I offer a gentle resistance to the relentless demands of perfection, speed, and disposability.

My practice embraces imperfection, atrophy, and stillness. The frayed pages of old encyclopaedias and poetry collections, the punch cards that once directed the looms of the textile industry, and that also carried the earliest language of the computer, become in my hands not nostalgia, but a question: what do we preserve, what do we allow to disappear, and who decides? Geometry, symmetry, and repetition create a dialogue between order and decay, between structure and vulnerability. This balance is rooted in my background as a graphic designer, but softened by the raw tangibility of matter.

Beneath my practice lies a deep engagement with the body, not as a fixed image, but as a living, sensing presence. Bodily experience, including limitation and vulnerability, shapes the way I work, and remains often implicit rather than visible. Pain, in this context, is invisible and profoundly present; it shapes perception, movement, and attention. Through material and gesture, I explore how the body carries memory, how it absorbs time, and how inner experience can surface without becoming explicit narrative.

Walking is an essential part of my process. In nature, I find both the mental space and the heightened sensitivity my work requires. In the studio, I allow objects to rest until the right constellation emerges, quietly, but with certainty. The process is slow, intuitive, and considered.

At a moment when the world produces more images than ever before, faster, cheaper, and without a hand, slowness is not a limitation. It is a position. My work does not begin with data or algorithms, but with the silent intelligence held inside a worn object: in the wood that remembers a hand, in the punch card that translated a weaver's body into the rhythm of a machine. What I make cannot be generated. It requires time, touch, and a life that has gone into it.

My work is an invitation: to pause at imperfection, to feel the continuity between past and present, and to reflect on the quiet connections between body and matter, memory and material, the visible and the unseen.

Standing still is not going backwards.

Marinda Vandenheede