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 III

These rooms are the result of research into the meanings of open-closed, light-dark, transparent-opaque. References to other times and cultures have been deliberately applied here, not to actualise the past, but to fade away any notion of time and place. The use of textiles in these rooms refers to the similarity between clothing and home. A garment is like a 'first home', a covering that protects the body and can also give it an identity and a position.


This collection of rooms is currently on display in the solo exhibition Ingeborg Meulendijks: Het Geheime Huis at Odapark, Venray (The Netherlands), from 28 September 2025 to 4 January 2026.

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