eccles fellowship
In 2022 I was awarded a fellowship from the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. My proposal was to work on a visual arts project about séances, women spiritual mediums, and telegraphy, using the library’s unique archives.
For the three years beforehand, I had been researching these topics as they relate to Spiritualism—at first to develop some ghost stories I was writing, and then purely for my own interest. It’s fair to say Spiritualism haunted me. As someone raised in the rigid hierarchy of Catholicism, I was intrigued by this religion that had no gatekeeping priests, that endorsed the spiritual power of the individual. It held the core precept that the soul survives physical death, and that the living can communicate with the spirit world those souls inhabit. Not too long ago, Spiritualism was popular in North American and British thought if not central to it—consider how enmeshed with their scientific and artistic innovation it was. And yet, watch people squirm when you mention the word séance.
I’d like to put some pressure on that squirm, ask some questions of it.
At the same time that Spiritualism was on the rise and people were developing practices to communicate with the dead, the technology of the telegraph, another practice of communicating across space and time, spread in usage. There’s a rich conceptual overlap between the two practices, though the telegram, of course, is accepted as a verified form of communication, whereas spiritual communication is dismissed by the mainstream as bogus, imagined. With the unusually high presence of women in what could be considered positions of power (the spirit mediums), not to mention Spiritualism’s favoring of intuition over logic, what else gets dismissed in the process?
I wanted to create an opportunity to see the othered translated into mainstream material form. It’s my hope that changing the material encounter with an archive can shift our thinking and cultivate space for alternative accounts of experience. So with support from the Eccles Centre, I crafted a series telegrams using transcribed recorded spirit messages from the audio recordings of séances held at the library as the communicated text.
In the month I spent at the British Library I devoted most of my time to the Dan Zerdin archive, which contains a rare 1934 recording of what was at the time considered the world’s largest séance. The Zerdin recording offers a first-hand, unfiltered experience of a historical Spiritualism, and it does so through the body of Florence Perriman, a woman and a medium lost to history.
In addition to the holdings at the British Library, I visited the National Telegraph Museum and Archives in Porthcurno, Cornwall, where the transatlantic cable to North America lands in Europe, as well as Spiritualist and occult-related archives at Senate House (University of London), Cambridge University, and the Tate.
A more detailed explanation of the project can be found here in a piece I wrote for the British Library website. Three collections of works resulting from the fellowship research constituted my contribution to my joint show Spirit Studies. Additional series of telegrams are in progress.
