Jaqualine Shanee Hall is an artist from the Sandhills region of North Carolina, now based in Washington, D.C. Working through a combination of scanography and digital manipulation, she explores how grief and distortion shape the ways we hold together and attempt to preserve meaningful fragile relationships. Her work grows from a love of the natural world, tracing how plants reflect our own emotional landscapes. Influenced by Victorian occult photography and botany, she combines scanned invasive flora with delicate digital editing to create images that feel both eerie and haunting.
She is currently an MFA candidate at The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores how invasive plants become sites where grief, distortion, and altered perception take visible form. Severed connections and invasive thoughts mirror the ecological invasions that shape both the landscape and the mind.
Drawing from Victorian occult photography and botany, I’m drawn to practices that sought to capture the fragile and unseen. Both of these practices of science and mysticism found resonance with the ways we attempt to hold onto what continually slips away.
Through scanography, I use invasive plants to examine how material layering can evoke altered states of perception. The process of repetition transforms each specimen into a phantom image. Fading in and out of clarity, never fully present or completely gone.
These spectral forms become metaphors for grief and obsession, where beauty and decay intertwine. Navigating these shifting realities, I reexamine my own invasive patterns. How fixation and loss bury themselves into us. The work ultimately asks how the unseen might be given form. Not to resolve or exorcise it, but as a haunting that remains.