Memory is a Whisoer
Memory is a Whisper
Statement
Wade’s Grandmothers (Gram and Granny) were both diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in within months of one another. They lost the battle a few years later, again within months of one another. As a result, she has become obsessed with absorbing her Grandmothers’ and consequently her own past. As they struggled to retain their identity and their memories, she is now determined to gather them and add them to her own.
Collected items and personal locations belonging to and inspired by Wade’s matriarchal lineage are the heart of this work, alongside her physical and emotional inheritance. She uses herself as a representation of all the women who came before alongside everyday things laden with stories themselves and so many memories. Her own memories and those given to her by family, plus a vast collection of family photographs, she builds narratives within the frame. Through the years and through the course of creating, the narrative stray into personal reflections. Gram and Granny spent their entire lives in Oklahoma. The state was in their blood and in their souls. No matter where she makes photographs, the aura of this homeland is a constant presence in the images. Almost her whole family still lives in Oklahoma. With the recent death of a favored aunt, the first loss from her mother’s generation, Wade has recently seen the focus of the work shifting to the next group of women in her family.
This work was initially sparked, and continues to live, as a reactionary coping mechanism, a way to deal with loss. Wade adds images to the series when she learns something new about her family or when a song, a smell, a story, or a dusty object in an antique store speaks to her of familial history. All images are captured with a 1947 4x5 Graflex Press camera and archivally printed in editions of 25.