Telegraphy of the Etheric Plane
In the series, I take transcriptions of spirit voices from recorded séances archived at the British Library and reimagine them as telegrams.
The religion of Spiritualism maintains that the soul survives physical death, and that the living can communicate with the spirit world those souls inhabit—the séance was one way this occurred. While Spiritualists in the nineteenth century were establishing practices to communicate with the dead, the technology of the telegraph, another practice of communicating across space and time, spread in usage. Dominant culture has been quick to dismiss the veracity of spiritual communications yet privileged those transmitted through technological means. Can changing the material encounter with an archive shift our thinking and cultivate space for alternative accounts of experience?
A combination of analog and digital collage methods were used to make these archival prints.
I'd like to thank the Eccles Centre at The British Library, London, for supporting this project with a fellowship. Research and making was completed in 2023.
