I am visiting Ingeborg Meulendijks’ studio and sitting on a stool. Ingeborg is making coffee in another part of the monastery building where she lives and works. Sounds from the convent garden drift in through the open window: birds, rustling trees and the distant radio of construction workers. 
Inside, it is quiet.  
There is a striking amount of empty floor space. On that floor are four rows of tables, and on those tables are a number of wooden boxes open on one side. 

I turn around on my stool and look into the box behind me. I see a kind of scale model, very precisely crafted in wood. So, each box contains a different room, with windows and sometimes a piece of miniature furniture. A table, a bed, a coat rack, or a stool. 
Next to me is a table lamp, a real one, life-size. The lamp hangs, bent over and just above the model. I continue to look into the small wooden room whilst I search under the table for the light switch. When the lamp lights, for a moment I think that someone is coming home to that little wooden world into which I am peering. 

I sit up straight again – leaving the table lamp on – and look around me. Black-and-white photographs hang on the wall, photographs taken of the interiors of the models into which I was just looking. The photographs are larger than the wooden models and, just like the light switch, for a moment they work in a similar way. They make me forget that, in reality, these rooms do not exist. I see the light of a summer evening falling on the wall, a book that has just been opened on the table, a bed with a slept-upon pillow. 
These are inhabited rooms, living spaces, whose occupants have simply stepped away for a moment... to make coffee in another room for example.

Now that I have been here longer, I can appreciate the details. The precisely sawn wood, the proportions of the rooms, the light filtered through a thin cloth, but also how the grain of the wood is magnified and visible in the photographs. 
I ponder over how much endless patience it must have taken to create these pieces. Consider the making of a stool that is only a few centimetres tall... Now, suppose that everything here had happened in reverse order: Firstly Ingeborg made a tiny stool and then her models, her studio, the monastery, the garden and the rest of the world, which grew around it all as if by nature. And she saw that it was good. And went to make coffee!
“Nonsense,” I think to myself.

Or is it? After all, the big is always hidden in the small: wasn’t the entire universe already hidden in one tiny particle just before the Big Bang? But where in that expanding universe is the stool I’m sitting on now?
I decide it’s better to stay where I am. I bend over the scale model again and switch off the table lamp.
The diffuse light coming through the windows casts short shadows on the floor; the day has clearly started. A stool stands casually in the corner. This room smells of coffee.


Joep Vossebeld
artistic director of Odapark and writer


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.