The artist behind the art: Nina Vandeweghe

7 August 2025

Art is personal, but often there is a barrier between the public and the artist. This week, Belga English brings the creators to the reader in a series of four intimate interviews with female artists in Belgium.

Belgian artist Nina Vandeweghe is not interested in being palatable. “I’m a very authentic person, and this has been my problem my whole life. People aren’t used to that,” she says.

Much of her work stems from lived experience, particularly the often-unspoken pains of womanhood: heartbreak, fertility, exhaustion and the subtle and not-so-subtle violence in romantic and societal expectations. Her work is both defiant and vulnerable. “I’m not easy on myself,” she admits. “People don’t see the vulnerability behind the in-your-face art.”

But Vandeweghe’s work is never just a confession. It’s also a kind of resistance, especially in how it transforms anger into creation. “Transitional anger,” she calls it, as defined by philosopher Martha Nussbaum. A form of anger that is directed towards positive change suggesting that anger can be a catalyst for constructive action.

“We are all performing in this society"

Questioning power is a pivotal part of Vandeweghe’s work. “We are all performing in this society in a way that doesn’t allow for real emotions in public,” she says. For Vandeweghe, making art is a way to pull those emotions into the public sphere. “If there is emotional abuse happening, do we keep that private because it isn’t part of the narrative?”

While creators can provide visual proof of their vulnerability, Vandeweghe is someone who lives her art. She recalls a date with a man who told her his priority was to get to know the person he was dating well. She opened up to let him know about her egg-freezing process. She never heard from him again.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to externalise her experiences, after considering the complex, not to mention expensive, process of freezing her eggs, she created a series of ceramic yolky cracked eggs to fund the endeavour.

Another bold ceramic piece is her email from an ex, immortalised beyond the digital. “We used to put things in stone,” she says. “Now, you send an email in this fleeting moment. It’s fast, done. It’s reactionary. Painting the words onto ceramic gives it a sense of permanence. It is something that stays.”

She wants to expand the piece into a sort of triptych: “The first version is the email as it was written, the second has areas that are censored or redacted, the parts that we 'should not' show to the public and the third version is Chat GPT’s version”.

Vandeweghe is fascinated with the immediacy of the digital world and how her art can slow that process down. “Everything is immediate now. We react immediately on social media or make reaction videos. People are on this hamster wheel of constant rage,” she observes. “Painting and making ceramics are slow processes”. She likens her artistic practice to a filter for her immediate reactions: “Painting becomes therapy because I am slowing everything down.”

A hallmark of Vandeweghe’s work is the humour she infuses into otherwise tragic commentaries. The figures in her paintings, often exaggerated, grotesque and cartoonish, serve as a Trojan horse to get her point across. “You can’t always make a point through attack—if you can make someone laugh, they might actually hear you,” she notes.

Her background as an illustrator informed her creative style and aided in engaging a sometimes skittish public. “The exaggerations help create a bit of distance. The message becomes less threatening," she says.

Sinister smoothness

No part of the process or materials is overlooked in her creations. Vandeweghe uses oil paint to suffuse her depictions with a deliberate smoothness. “The aesthetic is intentionally sleek, smooth, shiny,” she says of her work, a nod to the commodification of femininity in capitalist culture. “Everything has to be smooth, especially women. Our skin, our speech, our behaviour, but we are exhausted.”

To capture the exhaustion she refers to, Vandeweghe depicts women melting on her canvases. The figures are slumped or blurring, “The mask is melting away. We do so much to manage how we look and are perceived, I want to remove the facade,” she says.

In an acknowledgement of how women have been portrayed in art for millennia, Vandeweghe plays with the aesthetic “passivity” of women: Adorned in sheer fabric, gracefully sprawled on chaise lounges- this was not a version of reality that Vandeweghe could adhere to. “We are real! We are laying on a couch in dirty clothes, existing without having to be beautiful.”

In her latest project, Vandeweghe turns her attention to the feminist monster theory, how monsters are not solely creatures, but symbols shaped by society's unconscious anxieties. Women who transgress social norms have historically been constructed as monstrous, resulting in their bodies, desires and intellect being made into cultural threats. "I want to examine how women and femininity are represented as monstrous if they don’t obey the normative narrative," she says.

She will pair this trope with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a fictional character archetype often depicted as a quirky, eccentric and free-spirited young woman who exists to help a male protagonist overcome his personal struggles and embrace life.

Like Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Disney cartoons, which he saw as a “realism” that mirrors distorted modern lives, Vandeweghe’s work holds a mirror up to society through distortion. The hyperbolic images grip the audience while letting them in on the satire.

While there is a loneliness that comes with her commentary and a subsequent backlash, Vandeweghe’s authenticity and dance with humour have proven to be a glaze that makes her message, like her ceramic emails, permanent.

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