A Haunting That Remains
Open Access DepositedMy mother lives with schizophrenia. One of the last stable bonds we share is by talking about plants and the earth beneath our feet. Sadly, with time, these connections are slowly being severed. My artwork bears witness to the hauntings I carry. I use plants as sites where grief and distortion are given visible form. These hauntings parallel the emergence of grief in occult photography, Victorian botany, and the period’s gendered diagnosis of hysteria. Spirit photography claimed to capture the ephemeral or unseen, conjuring apparitions of the dead. Botany sought to preserve the life of fragile plants for aesthetic displays. The diagnosis of hysteria brought the medical mistreatment of women due improper diagnosis and gendered exclusion. By revisiting an era that pathologized the emotional lives of women, I use invasive plants to question how these inner worlds can materialize as ecological and psychological metaphors for visible grief through the body and non-human forms. Using scanography, a photographic process utilizing a flat-bed scanner, I explore how material layering can mimic altered perceptions of reality. The invasive plants act as disruptive forces that sever connections. A scanner is a contemporary tool that carries the historic photographic practice of contact printing––photographs captured without the use of a traditional lens. Lost into distortions of the mind, the scanner transforms these plants into phantom images that fade in and out of presence, serving as a tangible form to invasive thoughts and memories. These spectral plant forms become metaphors for grief and obsession, where decay intertwines with the desperate act of holding on. Navigating through these nuanced and complex layers of ever-shifting realities, I reexamine my own invasive patterns. How fixation and loss can bury themselves into us. The 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.
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