Jaqualine Shanee Hall - A HAUNTING THAT REMAINS

A HAUNTING THAT REMAINS

The glass does not break beneath my hand. Instead, I fracture, drifting into reverie.

In this series, I draw very personal inspiration from the historical influence of Victorian botany, occult photography, and the period’s gendered diagnosis of female hysteria. Spirit photography attempted to conjure the unseen, while botany sought to preserve fragile life through aesthetic displays. Revisiting this era, I use plants to question how inner worlds materialize as ecological and psychological metaphors for visible grief and the ethics of perceived care.

Using layered scanography techniques and external light sources, I use my body and invasive plants to mimic altered perceptions of reality. My face and hands move across the scanner bed, creating shifting depths that resist a stable form. Through distortion, these forms become phantom images that fade in and out of presence. My work ultimately asks how the unseen worlds within us might be given form, not to resolve or exorcise these specters, but as a haunting that remains.