VICTORIAN FEELINGS
Between 1895 and 1901 theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater created plates of color that corresponded to various emotional states, which were published alongside essays about perception in their book Thought Forms (1905). The process Besant and Leadbeater used is unknown but may have been similar to the “thought photography” physicians and scientists in same period experimented with by pressing photosensitive paper to a person’s head and asking them to focus on a feeling.
Combining the correspondences in Thought Forms with the late nineteenth century photographic trend of cartes de visite, Victorian Feelings experiments with collage as a method of interpreting emotion in an archive.
Each feeling in the series resulted from meditating on the images of individual sitters posing for their photograph, and then pressing different colored papers to the cards to sense the strongest connection. The residue of experience embedded in the material guided the choice.
History relegates feelings to the insignificant, the unrecordable. But feelings—and how people use them—dictate much of what happens. The Victorians captured in these cards, which I sourced from a car boot sale in England, lived in a time when emotions were socially regulated and coded, and abundantly explored in literature and art.
Like the work of Besant and Leadbeater, this project seeks to make what is invisible into visible forms. It wonders what don’t we know about what we see.
