“Klein en meeslepend ('small and compelling' ),” reads the nameplate on the studio occupied by Ingeborg Meulendijks. She simply clipped the text out of a Dutch newspaper, but it perfectly describes the miniature rooms she builds out of wood. Despite their small scale, these models carry a huge impact, as if each tiny detail adds to the emotional charge of the piece.

“If I sit quietly in a space, a dialogue develops with the room, as if the building itself becomes another individual,” says the artist about her fascination for buildings. She also refers to the models she creates as 'portraits'. My first encounter with her work made me think of Andrej Tarkovsky's film, The Sacrifice.  In it, the main character's house – his most precious possession – almost becomes a character in its own right. Yet he chooses to sacrifice the house in the hopes of a better world.  A few weeks after meeting with Meulendijks, I received these words on Tarkovsky written by Willem Jan Otten, “It is an intriguing thought that our inner self is a house, with different rooms, and that some people have the gift of moving through the place like a guide, and of recording the journey on film”.

Meulendijks likes the many layers of Tarkovsky's work, loaded with meaning, his attention to detail, and the slow pace with which he allows a story to unfold. Meulendijks, too, takes her time, sometimes working on a model for months on end.  The inner self Otten writes about is her subject of choice.  Her pieces are usually prompted by a detail:  the light cast on a table, an impression left in a pillow.   She then builds a room around this, sometimes an entire house.  Each attribute is given meaning and no detail of the construction is out of place. The bases supporting the houses, the protective outer walls, but also the most minute aspects of the interior – everything adds to the emotional charge of the piece.


‍From an article by Rebecca Nelemans, freelance art historian and journalist