Exhibitions at The Puppet Hub: “Two Ways Down” by Laura Heit

Visualizing What We Can’t See:
The Puppetry and Animation of Laura Heit

An Essay by Will Bixby

Laura Heit is an artist who moves fluidly across forms, working as a puppeteer, animator, and designer. A multi-hyphenate maker, she built her practice as master builder and puppet designer for Chicago’s Redmoon Theater and through formal training at both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and London’s Royal College of Art. Across mediums, Heit describes her work as visualizing the things we can’t see, making the invisible, the overlooked, and the imagined suddenly tangible. With three distinct productions at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival: a live-puppetry performance, a collection of animated short films, and an interactive gallery installation, audiences had ample opportunity at catching a glimpse of the unseen. 

Two Ways Down Installation 

Heit’s thesis that puppetry is animation is fully realized in her installation piece Two Ways Down. At the center of a small gallery space in the Fine Arts Building sit three spotlit dioramas slowly rotating on a tabletop. Each of the dioramas depicts a miniature calamity in hand-cut paper: human figures swing from ladders and telephone poles; cars and airplanes are caught in a vortex; and halved bodies protrude from the ground as faceless onlookers point and flee. As the dioramas rotate, their shadows flicker across the gallery space and dance along the walls, pulling viewers into a quiet current of catastrophe. 

At the same time, a short sequence of hand-drawn animation beamed from a projector is refracted through curved plexiglass and looped over the rotating shadows. An endless procession of figures and forms morphs and dissolves. Dismembered heads float and flit across the space, arms and legs swim like little fish, and human-animal hybrids wander ghostlike across the gallery. As the shadows of the diorama intermingle with the projected animation, we encounter a live, mixed-media collage, each form folding over one another and suspending us in a moment that feels outside ordinary time. 

Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Heit’s puppet animation installation transposes the surrealist, hyper-morbid imagery of Bosch’s painting into a blend of media forms. The shadows depict scenes of familiar, albeit chaotic, distress: plane and automobile crashes or slipping off a ladder, while the ghostly animation introduces a more uncanny, otherworldly dread. It is from the space where both forms intersect that Heit’s meaning springs forth; the floating ghost heads of an unimaginable nightmare blend into the happenstance of falling from a ladder, illustrating how extravagant and banal calamities merge into one to the point of being unrecognizable. As an allegory of environmental collapse (a warning of a future that has already arrived), Heit suggests that, unless drastic action is taken, the most hellish depictions of calamity and collapse will ultimately be sucked into the background noise of daily life. 

Heit fully implicates the viewers in her warning as we move through the gallery, our bodies throw new shadows that intermingle with the piece, casting us as players in this chaotic scene. Similarly, while the images are thematically grotesque, they are presented in Heit’s playful design style, with soft curves, elongated lines, and cartoonish expressions. This combination of darkness and humor creates a sense of unease, as we feel guilty for laughing at the images. Heit’s installation doesn’t just depict catastrophe, it asks us to recognize our place within it and take action before it is too late.  

In tracing Laura Heit’s work across puppetry, animation, and installation, a clearer picture emerges of an artist committed to exposing thoughts and feelings that often go unnoticed, unrecognized, or ignored. Heit’s performances ask viewers to look more closely—not just at her work but at the unnoticed worlds that surround us—and to take just a moment to revel in seeing the unseen.