Artist Statement

Standing still is NOT going backwards ...

I am a contemporary visual artist who works with found, weathered, and out-of-use materials (wood, paper, textiles, and metal), each carrying the quiet marks of time and human touch. I do not search for them; they seem to find me. Imperfect, eroded, and forgotten, they arrive as silent witnesses, bearing traces of stories, of use, of loss. By giving them a new life, I offer a gentle defiance against the relentless demands for perfection, speed, and consumption.

My practice is an embrace of imperfection, atrophy, and stillness. I work on the fragile pages of old books, encyclopedias, novels, volumes of poetry, and on punch cards from the textile industry, once tools of early computing. In my sculptural works, I assemble worn materials and tools, stripping them of their functional logic, letting them speak in new compositions. Geometry, symmetry, and repetition form a dialogue between order and decay, structure and fragility. This balance is rooted in my background as a graphic designer, yet softened by the raw tactility of my chosen materials.

In recent years, the body has entered my work, not as an image alone, but as a presence and a language. Pain is both invisible and deeply here; it shapes how I perceive, how I move, how I breathe. Through form and material, I explore how the body talks, holds memory, trauma, and resilience,  and how these inner landscapes can be made visible. This dimension is intimate, yet never confessional; it invites sensing, not telling.

I walk often. In nature, I find both the ideas and the state of mind my work requires. Walking slows me, opens my senses, lets thoughts and associations rise. In the studio, I let objects rest, until the right constellation appears, quietly undeniable. The process is slow, intuitive, deliberate.

I want my work to be a place of pause, a space where the gaze lingers, where small details reveal themselves, where the layers of time can be felt as well as seen. Sometimes a title carries a quiet wink, a thread of playfulness that draws the viewer closer.

As in the Eastern philosophical traditions that inspire me, wonder, interconnection, and stillness are not passive states but acts of presence. My work is a meditation on imperfection, and a belief that to stand still is not to go backwards, but to heal.

In essence, my art is an invitation: to see beauty in the imperfect, to touch the past through the present, and to feel the threads that bind body and matter, memory and material, the visible and the unseen.

Marinda Vandenheede