Since 1997, Ingeborg Meulendijks has been working on Het Geheime Huis ('The Secret House') an ongoing art project consisting of sculptural models, monumental photographs of modelled spaces and work on paper. By playing with scale, perspective and light, she explores how we experience places on an emotional and intimate level.
Her thoughts on dwelling and being are visualised in the collection of small-scale rooms.

‘The scale model stands on the threshold between imagination and reality, inviting the viewer to step into both worlds.’

Ingeborg designs and builds these rooms in her studio, located in part of the 19th-century monastery of Steyl. Here, she meticulously saws and sands scale models made of wood, cardboard and textiles. She captures the atmosphere of these spaces with an analogue camera and develops the images herself in a darkroom. She consciously chooses this slow way of working in which, like the monks and nuns in Steyl, she does everything by hand. It is precisely this slowing down that liberates the creative process from the time pressure and haste that often dominate our daily lives.


Version I

The secret house is a large collection of models of interiors made mostly of wood.  The interior spaces represent a personal reality – spaces where memories, observations, dreams, and ideas come together. The scale models stand at the crossroads of imagination and reality, inviting forays into both. The artist presents her work in two ways:  She exhibits the models themselves and photographs of the interiors.  Each discipline summons its own reality and experience. In the photographs, the spaces lose the tactile attraction of the models. The playful desire to wander around through the space is transformed by the lack of perspective into a puzzling aloofness. Fact and fiction seem to come together, but they also play off of one another.

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