INTRODUCTION

I follow the curator of the Bonnefantenmuseum up the stairs, through the doors to the first floor. We pass by other works from the collection and then enter the room where four people are working. The walls and floor are covered with green paper strips. A museum worker is standing on a ladder, patiently waiting for instructions from the artist. In his hand he holds a strip of bright green paper. The ladder is held by another museum worker who is also looking at the artist. In the middle of the gallery space are the artist and her assistant. They are in the middle of a conversation, and when the curator walks up to them in order to introduce me, they look a bit agitated. I feel out of place. The room just feels too small for the artist, the assistant, two museum workers, the curator and me. In the intimacy of the room, I don't want my presence to interfere too much, so I watch in silence as the artist confers with her assistant and instructs the workers to organise the papers on the walls, slowly transforming the white space into a green space. Like paint on a canvas.

It is May 2004 when I am introduced to Joëlle Tuerlinckx (b. Brussels, 1958), a Belgian artist who at the time was installing her work at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (the Netherlands). The artist looked focused while working on the room-filling installation, which she later called A Stretch Museum Scale 1:1, een voorstel voor het Bonnefantenmuseum (Groene zaal). This green room, installed by the artist, her assistant and two museum workers, was the last in a series of three room-filling installations that were acquired by the museum between 2002 and 2003. [figures 13, 14, 15, 16] The acquisition of these three installations (or spaces) emerged from an earlier solo exhibition by the artist: A Stretch Museum Scale 1:1 (proposition for a stretched walk in a compact museum) at the Bonnefantenmuseum in 2001.

Although the acquisition by the Bonnefantenmuseum was not a case study within the Inside Installations project, after seeing the installations and talking to the curator of the museum, I decided to perform research on the works.