Ronewa Art Project is pleased to present Belgium artist Marinda Vandenheede's online solo exhibition, Traces of a System. Vandenheede's opened in our gallery's online viewing room and on Artsy on September, 3, 2026. Her exhibition runs until October, 10, 2026.
"I work with materials that have lived - wood, paper, textiles, metal - carrying traces of time, touch, and forgotten stories. In my practice, imperfection, stillness, and the body itself become language." - Marinda Vandenheede
Roger Washington: Your current exhibition, Traces of a System, explores what remains after systems have changed, been concealed, or been given the possibility to change. How does this concept relate to the position you want to take as an artist today?
Marinda Vandenheede: My work begins with things that have already lived. A punch card from a weaving loom. A yellowed page torn from a book. They once belonged to something larger, but that whole is gone. The card no longer instructs a machine. The page is no longer read by anyone.
That is where I work from. Not from an image I decide in advance, but by looking, gathering, shifting and leaving out until something remains that feels right. What is visible never tells the whole story. Often the meaning lies in what has fallen silent.
I do not explain it. I set the page down and ask myself what it still says now that no one reads it.
Marinda Vandenheede, Endymion II, 2025, Ink and pencil on reclaimed book pages, 17.5 x 24 cm. 6 7/8 x 9 1/2 in.
RW: When you compare how you worked earlier in your career with the decisions you make today, can you explain how you hold on to older ideas while at the same time developing new ones?
MV: My work has changed, but certain questions keep returning. I do not preserve old ideas, I run into them again. Seen from another time, they say something different.
I used to want to control an image until it was right. Now I leave more to what happens while I work. A tear, a stain, a surface that will not be steered. The old ideas do not disappear, they change shape. Sometimes I only understand years later why one of them had stayed with me.
So I do not make something new for the sake of the new. I simply ask the same question again: what do I see this time that I did not see then?
Marinda Vandenheede, Illegible, 2026, Ink on reclaimed book pages from 1889, 44 x 30 cm. 17 3/8 x 11 3/4 in.
RW: You trained in graphic design before developing your own artistic practice. What did that training teach you about the way you look and build an image? And what did you later begin to question or leave behind as your own visual language developed?
My training in graphic design taught me to look. At proportion, at rhythm, at what happens in the space between two elements. I learned to build an image and to steer it.
MV: Later I began to distrust that steering. An image can also arise from something you do not fix in advance. Intuition became more important, not as randomness but as a way of looking that comes from experience. I still start from composition, but I leave a margin for what I could not have thought up.
Usually that is exactly the part I feel something in. I learned how to make an image. After that I learned to trust what cannot be made.
Marinda Vandenheede, Breathing Rooms 3, 2022, Acrylic paint, reclaimed industrial punch cards, thread, on hand soldered copper frame, 25 x 37 x 14 cm. 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 x 5 1/2 in.
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