Marinda Vandenheede Belgian, 1976

The starting point is a page from an old poetry book — lines that speak of beauty, imagination, the fleeting. Over that text I lay a tight, geometric form: black, angular figures, broken by a red line, mirrored symmetrically across the two pages of the open spread.

Where the previous series let the system weather or become covered until it nearly disappears, here the opposite happens: a new, rigid system — hard, geometric, controlled — lays itself over the language of the poem. Two registers collide: the poetic, associative, elusive quality of the verse against the exactness of a form that refuses to be distracted. The red line breaks that rigidity just enough to tip the scale — a mark of intervention, of decision.

Smaller in format than my very first series, these works form a subtle return to that beginning — now with a stricter, more graphic view of what a system can do to language. Meant to be seen apart but born from the same movement: three moments where form settles over verse. — Marinda Vandenheede