A TRAPDOOR IN EVERY ROOM
An interpretation of the work of Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
By Jurate Sasnaitis



We speak directly but hear ambiguously.
We see unambiguously but espy allegories.

The trapdoor can be an escape or a snare. The door may appear flush to the surface but in the gap between opening and closing, there is room for deceit. In the genteel murder mysteries of Agatha Christie, a life of grace and decorum harbours underlying wickedness. The surface bears little resemblance to reality.

This is the story of Gracia & Louise becoming the Agatha-authors of their visual text. The Agatha-verse offers such comfort because it is instantly recognisable, a nostalgic hankering for the past, a Robert Browning kind of world, where it is yet possible to think:

The year 's at the spring,
And day 's at the morn;
Morning 's at seven;
The hill-side 's dew-pearl'd;
The lark 's on the wing;
The snail 's on the thorn;
God 's in His heaven—
All 's right with the world!

Of course, NOTHING’s right with the world! The spring neither rains nor buds, the dawn’s smogged in, the hillside’s eroded and the lark’s extinct — or if not the lark then some-lark, the many-larks — the snail’s irradiated. Is God dead? NO nothin’ is ok at all! Gracia & Louise would beguile us with a collage of delightful phrases, of postcards found and invented, of etchings and drawings. Our eye is caught by the pretty surface, but before our mind has a chance to turn aside, we are struck… the people long gone, the animals extinct, the birds entangled in fine wire, even those strange mechanical creatures, motorcycles, like screeching, raucous gulls with plumage ascribed to them that they have never owned.

The Gracia-Louise-Agatha-verse is the world inverted; a sad, mad, bad snapshot made palatable by the delicacy of line, the subtlety of tone, the charm of juxtaposition. But beware, don’t let your eye be deceived. Allow my warning to come from yet another alternative universe, the Buffy-verse:

From beneath you, it devours.


{Images below, from A trapdoor in every room; Humpback whales repair the ice sheet, and No one seemed to mind so I proceeded to help myself.}