Marinda Vandenheede Belgian, 1976

A large surface of punch cards, joined together into one plane and painted over in black. Beneath the cards lies white, so that each hole is no longer an empty opening but a point of light breaking through the black. What was once an instruction — row after row, hole after hole — becomes here a night sky, a dense pattern of small points of light spreading across the whole surface.

Over this lies a form: a tight, symmetrical figure, born from a movement of the body, held still in line. That same form returns in my work on old book pages, here enlarged to a scale that takes hold of the entire punch-card surface. Black against the speckled white, a gesture that lays itself over the system with force and rearranges it for a moment.

What remains is not text, not instruction, but an image born from the collision of two orders: the strict, repeating regularity of the punch card, and the fluid, bodily logic of the form laid over it. — Marinda Vandenheede