A fairer House than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors -
I dwell in Possibility - Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, one of the great American poets of the nineteenth century, was confined to her home her entire life. Necessity made the interior her thinking space, where she used her poetry to build on a fairer house than prose. For this house, she disliked doors and preferred windows. A door confronted her with the harsh reality of the outside world; a window offered freedom of view where the imagination could wander, and where every glimpse to the outside added a new layer to her thinking. Her self-imposed seclusion allowed her to observe the everyday in depth – and thereby transcend it. Within the possibilities of the poem, she created a free space for the mind.
Ingeborg’s models construct a similar space: they too exude an air of introspection. The rooms are inhabited, yet the occupant herself is absent. As a visitor, you can imagine yourself in her world for a little while. Here she sleeps, her books are on the shelf, there she sits at the table looking out. Yet, the doors never lead to a tangible outside. Daylight streams in through the windows, but the view remains white. By excluding the outside world, the gaze naturally turns to the interior. Here, matter and ideas start to interact. We observe how the windows introduce scale and the light creates intimacy, how walls are proportioned and can make a room silent, while shadows introduce a sense of movement and time. A mental space starts to emerge, where self-imposed solitude provides a place to reflect on the house that is our world.
Ingeborg’s secret houses do not exist anywhere, yet they are there. She carefully constructed the interiors out of wood, on a 1:7 scale, which is both symbolic and unusual. The fact that everything is seven times smaller than reality transforms the models into objects, into spaces within a space. In the photographs, the scaling is barely visible, In the photographs, the scaling is barely visible, and the subtle alienation and confusion this creates blurs the line between materiality and image. Meanwhile, the precision and attention to detail betray the same concentrated gaze found in Dickinson’s poetic observations. Nothing is superfluous, and everything has meaning.
Emily Dickinson would often write down her poems on torn pieces of paper and adapted her ideas to the shape of the page. The interdependence between thought and space is also central to Meulendijk’s work. Her models and photographs are an exploration of where idea and form meet. It is precisely this space where the imagination speaks and free thinking becomes a reality.
Eireen Schreurs
architect, researcher and author of Material Dialogues, a dissertation on the influence of materiality and craftsmanship on the development of architectural culture
This text was written in conjunction with the solo exhibition Ingeborg Meulendijks: Het Geheime Huis’ at Odapark, Venray (The Netherlands), from 28 September 2025 to 4 January 2026.