INEZ WIJNHORST a Mutus Liber for our century

A propos JACOBS LADDERS , I quote the words of Inez herself, presenting the series of drawings she created in 2005:
"Since Jacob woke up, his ladder connecting heaven earth no longer exists. Humans have no longer acces to the higher spheres and the winged angels dare not surpass the ever growing distance.
These drawings are an attempt to reestablish this lost connection. They are objects to climb and help you up.The trip is difficult, maybe unstable or dangerous, but the less fearful might get to the top and the even braver ones, the ones that are not afraid of the fall, dare to jump from there and grab a cloud or a slip of an angels dress and see a glimps of destiny".

Poetical description of a mystical, alchemical vision, such as the one given in the old 1677 MUTUS LIBER, printed in La Rochelle.
The process is described as "solve et coagula" - a dissolution and coagulation taking place in the soul, transforming feelings,dreams, images, intuitions into something more than words could describe. We have here, in this artistic transmutation, a true mute book in the sense that the message it conveys is kept in the secret of the images. Images are our Art of Memory, as Frances Yates has so well explained. But images are also the way of expressing our deepest search, our Quest for a world that is "other " in many senses, the "otherness" hidden in our Unconscious, the Eyes described by alchemists when they say we have acquired new eyes: oculatus abis ( you leave with eyes) .
This magical opening of the eyes is something we get through Inez's experience of the ladders. Mystical, mythical, and also everyday ladders.
As she put in another painting-poem:

" a thread of Spring
a sort of shadow,
of the being of what I am."

( in Uma história mal contada)

To discover what we are, the mission (im)possible, the occult sense of those beautifully described ladders.