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Abstract
Deeply enmeshed in the Victorian Spiritualist community, artist and medium Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884) participated in séances and produced abstract watercolors years before the canonical rise of non-objective painting. The emergence of modern Spiritualism coincided with a period of rapid scientific and technological advancement, and Houghton’s autobiographical archive documents her interest in emerging visual and spatial technologies and philosophies. In addition to her relationship with inventor and social reformer Rev. Johnathan Murray Spear (1804-1887) and electrical engineer and telegraph technician Cromwell Varley (1828-1883), she was versed in the Transcendental Physics of Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834-1882). Drawing from her record as well as scholarship on telegraphy, electricity, and theories of retinal afterimages, catalogued by physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje (1787- 1869), this thesis places Houghton’s materialization of the unseen within a lineage of emerging nineteenth century thought surrounding invisible phenomena.