Artist Statement

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

The materials I use have all lived before they reach me: worn wood, pages from old books and poetry collections, rusted metal, the punched cards that once directed the looms of the textile industry and carried the earliest language of the computer. I do not search for them; they find me. Imperfect, eroded, discarded, they hold quiet traces of use, of touch, of loss. By giving them another life, I offer a gentle resistance to the demands of perfection, speed, and disposability.

Many of these objects are the residue of systems we build to make reality legible and predictable: the coded pattern of a loom, the ordering of a language, the grid of a map, the hidden infrastructure beneath a city, the framework of a belief. I open these orders rather than obey them. I take text away and let form appear, I let organic growth break a grid, I work my own pattern into a binary one. What returns is what the system was built to leave out. Geometry, symmetry, and repetition, the grammar of my background as a graphic designer, become a way to bring order's blind spots to the surface.

Not all of my work begins here. Some of it simply listens to a single worn object and the time held inside it. But the same question runs underneath: what do we preserve, what do we allow to disappear, and who decides?

Beneath everything lies the body, not as a fixed image but as a living, sensing presence. Medicine, too, is such a system: it reads the body through its specialisms and loses sight of the whole. What stays invisible, pain, vulnerability, whatever cannot be measured, escapes every framework. It shapes perception, movement, and attention, and remains present in the work without ever becoming its subject.

In the studio I let objects rest until the right constellation emerges, quietly but with certainty. The process is slow, intuitive, considered.

At a moment when the world produces more images than ever, faster and cheaper and without a hand, slowness is not a limitation. It is a position. What I make cannot be generated. It asks for time, for touch, and for 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