During each evening office (evening service) of the Norbertine Sisters of St Catharinadal, this church commemorates the sisters from their community who once died on that particular day. As this oldest women’s convent in the Netherlands has existed since 1271, this is a meaningful ritual. When the sisters talk about themselves as a group, they also mean all the sisters who died. Upside down and from right to left, Vincent de Boer calligraphs their names and dates of death in a handwriting he developed especially for the occasion. During A Deeper Shade of Soul, he continues to work on this on the spot.

As in monastic life, repetition, order, rhythm, regularity and devotion are central to this artist’s working practice. The creative process has a contemplative character. Vincent de Boer: ‘Performing a repetitive act for hours on end brings me close to the split of matter and non-matter. It offers me relief.’ Within the act of calligraphy, thousands of options arise. Variables such as the pressure on the brush and the amount of ink help determine the outcome. Through total surrender to the moment, things point themselves out. One action then dictates the next. The circular lifestyle of these monastics also corresponds to Vincent de Boer’s approach. Nothing, not even a drop of ink, disappears down the drain. The artist is literally a materialist. Not in the sense of accumulating stuff but in caring for and getting to the bottom of his inks, papers, brushes and other materials.

The desktop on which to work is at the same time a monumental sculpture through which the long roll of paper runs. This workstation is an artwork by Jonas Wijtenburg and is part of a series of modular artworks by him. The first word in the title MOD-Sint-Catharinadal is short for module. Within the modular system he developed, individual parts function as building blocks that can be used to build different things each time. From 3D print, pavilion, stage and sound installation to, as here, a kind of analogue printer or seismograph.