Cara Lee Wade

Cara Lee Wade, a teacher of photography at University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana is sharing her Mordangages with us, some with oils and watercolour added to the print.
From: Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA.
Shows: Mordancage and Chemi-lumens.

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Cara Lee Wade’s photographic practice embraces the serendipitous nature of analog and alternative photographic media to explore memory, impermanence, and the body. By allowing chemistry, time, and organic materials to intervene in the image-making process, she invites unpredictability as both subject and collaborator, revealing layered narratives of vulnerability, transformation, and inherited beauty. She is faculty at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland, dedicated to fostering visual storytelling and conceptual exploration.

“The physical and mental practice of alternative processes is both scientific and poetic, an act of listening and reciprocity.”

Fossil Poetry Statement (Chemi-Lumens)

Wild plants choose their space; they have memory, they learn. Domesticated plants thrive based on the care and attention they receive. Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer quantifies plants as “animated, living beings and as living beings they breathe, dance and preen”. The physical and mental practice is both scientific and poetic, an act of listening and reciprocity. Wade gathers plant materials and pigments with intention, allowing them to guide the work. The quest is to evoke a sense of place, not just as location, but as an ongoing symbiotic relationship.

Lumen printing is a cameraless photographic process involving photographic paper and organic materials, exposed in Sunlight. The Sun reacts with the organic materials to produce image and colors in the paper. The original images, like the experiences, are temporary. In Wade’s process, the images are scanned immediately after exposure, enlarged, and printed archivally on aluminum.

Insidious Charms Statement (Mordançage with and without Handcoloring)

Throughout history, women have put their bodies, and their psyches through torturous measures trying to live up to the elusive thing that is beauty. We have constricted our breathing and injected ourselves with poison. We have teetered precariously, balancing on miniscule pedestals and we have crafted our flesh into acceptable contours. But we have not been forced into doing so. We have consensually subjected ourselves to these ridiculous and dangerous tribulations.

These images have emerged from this dichotomy. I merge representations of the accepted and established notions beauty with those of my manufactured grotesque creating imagery intended to glorify and rebuke, ultimately giving way to a different definition of beauty, one of engaging oddity and lush ambiguity.

Also read the Mordancage article by Cara Lee Wade.

Contact Cara Lee Wade