In drawings by Sigrid van Woudenberg the trembling of light and heat makes you end up in a fata morgana. One becomes part of her fantasy world. You get hypnotized by these mirages and continue to look fascinated.
Her inscrutable drawings are almost photographic, like stills from a film. The large formats show small human figures in an overwhelming nature. The smaller drawings just zoom in on that. Do you see scenes from a memory? Or do you experience fragments of a dream you just woke up from? It can also be the silence before a storm or the peace after the delusion of a busy day. In any case, the black is intensely deep in the foreground against a sharply striking white. The light is shimmering between grey nuances. In the shadow of that light, with which the dark contrasts strongly, there is an event.
Van Woudenberg uses and examines her material in all possible ways. She sculpts it very physically as a sculptor, with great precision. The white background of the paper is sometimes left blank, appearing as light against the black Siberian chalk. She gives her material expressions from soft to hard and vice versa. With seemingly simple actions she sorts an optimal expression. All shades of grey from dark to light together form her colourful palette.
You look at a story that seems to be taking place slowly. Time actually stands still. The days seem calm and languid, frozen in images of memory or desire, as they were fairy-tales from the present without a beginning or an end. Her play of light and dark contrasts reinforces your sense of temperature, even a warm pleasant feeling. Present figures are airy moving or standing, sometimes lying down, but silent, also playing and airy dressed - it is always summer you would think. Sometimes a poetic title betrays her inner world. You can get lost undisturbed in all of Van Woudenberg's drawings. And she makes you part of her unbridled imagination.