Van den Eijnden’s practice investigates the ways we understand and operate concerning nature, time and grief through mediums such as patterning, photography, the photographic, painting, sculpture, installation, and text. Often referencing the Anthropocene, Van den Eijnden’s work is also focused on colour, the Sublime and aesthetics as well as the viewer’s interaction or specific physical viewpoint when engaging with a work of art. Throughout his work, Van den Eijnden hopes that by bringing together a kind of tension between nature, human design, and art, there is a new space opened up where we can appreciate the interconnectedness of all three, and where viewers can have a joyful, even a spiritual response.

He is particularly interested in exploring how we, as human beings, experience time. He notes that some of the most ground-breaking work being done today in modern physics suggests that time as we understand it ceases to exist at the quantum level and that although we experience time flowing from the past into the future, in a very real sense all time exists all the time. This realisation has prompted the artist to explicitly reference both the past and the future in his work, as a kind of reaching both forward and backward in time to achieve what he calls “a remembrance of the future and an anticipation of the past”.

Concepts of nature echo throughout his work but are often portrayed through patterning as seen in diverse outputs such as wallpaper-based sculptures, installation, and satellite predictive modelling of future sea-level rise in sculptural bookworks. His interest in photography stems from its ability to capture time, while engagement with the photographic references his training as a photographer as well as alternative forms of negatives, the act of drawing with light, and the use of viewpoint to control an image. Often audience engagement is required to fully activate a work, and also permits the viewer to craft their own memories of the objects and topics his work discusses. Van den Eijnden’s most recent works address grief through dichroic textworks exploring the qualities of beauty, anxiety, and vulnerability in short but purposefully crafted wording alluding to multiple overlapping perspectives or experiences. These layered meanings form a connection between the collective experience of ecological grief and the personal experience of individual grief that each of us encounters in our lives.

Van den Eijnden is a visual artist, designer, and educator born in Pictou, Nova Scotia (Piktuk, Mi’kma’ki) and currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia (K’emk’emeláy, S’ólh Téméxw). He received two undergraduate degrees in 2005—a Bachelor of Art: English, from Dalhousie University, and a Bachelor of Fine Art: Photography, from NSCAD University—and in 2015 he completed a Master of Fine Art: Visual Art, from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His practice as an artist coalesces around time, grief, and nature through mediums such as text, photography, sculpture, and installation. As an educator, he focuses on concept development, art direction, and cross-disciplinary approaches.