Three Rooms is about the way that narratives are pursued and constructed, and particularly in relation to archaeological themes of time, tradition and the modern world. Each room references mystery and discovery.

The bedroom in nineteenth century Wales belongs with that period of the reworking of an urban-rural and modern-traditional distinction; it foregrounds the supposed mystery of rural tradition, and its questioning.

The garret in London is an explicit trope of modernist detective fiction - the mystery of the locked room (see my book Experiencing the Past 1991, page 55-4). It tells of the making of interiority and self in quotidian existence.

The dining room discovered by archaeologists concerns the shaping of the quotidian past in a comforting form that answers questions of urban origins and civil values, questions interior to notions of Western civilization.

In each room mystery is both created and then resolved in mundane modernity just as it becomes disturbing. Modern distinctions are confirmed even as the interior force of otherness or alterity is acknowledged.

An argument of Three Rooms is to disrupt this tendency and to open space for other readings and perceptions.

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