When I arrive in her studio in the attractive town of Leuven, a short train ride south of Brussels, one of the first remarks South African artist Anna van der Ploeg makes is a comment on restlessness: she needs room to roam ­– in her mind, all over the world and in her studio. Van der Ploeg has left her homeland temporarily and is, for now, happily settled in Belgium. The group of prints created with master printer Roxy Kaczmarek earlier in the year at the David Krut workshop in Johannesburg, form the basis of Omens in Hot Bacon Contradiction, her first solo show in New York. In a two-room studio ­– all industrial high windows and clear light – lodged in the handsome old factory building belonging to the M Leuven (Museum Leuven) Cas–co five-month residency, Van der Ploeg is finalising works to complete her New York show and for the exhibition required by the Museum at the end of her stay. She is working in varied media – oil painting, steam-bent ply­­­­wood sculpture and printmaking in monotype and intaglio. Poetry, musings and the written word are also intrinsic to her practice; performative, kinetic ideas and floor-based sculptures may edge in too.

For the contiguous exhibitions taking place at David Krut 151 Gallery, Johannesburg and David Krut Projects New York, Van der Ploeg has devised works under the loose aegis of an unknown ‘game’: her images circle around ideas of  board games, washing flapping on lines, hands holding tiny pools of space; hands holding wisps of paper set alight in twists of smoke like rising wishes; feet misaligned in the secret space under a table; a dialogue with a frog in that same safe space under the table. She gives us private views of knees seen from above and feet seen from below, setting up arenas of purported domestic calm. Van der Ploeg has an uncomfortable talent for sizing up the tacit truths played out in small human interactions.