June 13 and 14 duo exhibition with poetry by Philipine Vinke and visual stories by Menna Kruiswijk.

Menna Kruiswijk, Harderwijk, has been looking at art for nearly 40 years and enjoys the beauty, inspiration and comfort that the arts offer her.

Until a year ago, she never made any work herself. However, she did use her creativity to create many exhibitions with work by other artists.

When she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2023, she was quickly alerted to the studies by Radboud UMC in Nijmegen: art as medicine. She decided to participate in the Art Cap study. In the studio of an artist, participants went in search of where to find their own creative flow. The idea behind it: in flow you suffer less from Parkinson’s symptoms and the effect lasts beyond the flow moment. Art as medicine.

Because Menna saw herself more as a creative thinker than a maker, it took her a while to find her way of creating. In her daily work in business, she guides people in developing their talents. In doing so, she starts from what is already there. That same starting point led her to making visual stories from existing material.

She found a beautifully designed magazine from a 2021 exhibition, Suffering Matters. She started taking the magazine apart and worked it into 26 collages down to the very last snippet.

Since June 28, 2025, she has been creating a daily visual story with images/material from that day’s newspaper about how she is doing, what she experienced that day, what touched her, who she met. The challenge is to use only the images from that day’s newspaper, no more. The effect is to experience flow and stimulate natural dopamine production. Watching & experiencing art has been a source of inspiration and reflection all her life. To this has now been added the flow of self-creation. In a special way, this completes the circle.

For the exhibition together with the poems of Philipine Vinke, Menna took up the challenge of creating visual stories to accompany some of Philipine’s poems. These as well as visual stories from the past year will be on display in the gallery on June 13 and 14.