“Lady X” is an intimate audio-visual portrait of my grandma’s life as a classical pianist, cellist
and Jazz singer in a process of searching for deeper meaning through spirituality and healing, spanning an unknown period of time around the 1980’s-90’s. For 26 years since her untimely death at 59 years of age, a shoe box with the brand name “Lady X” filled with cassettes has been in the family, in storage. In 2019 I began to go through them and found a humane and rich catalogue of personal recordings and pre-recorded tapes of her work as a musician, answer machine messages and disputes over debt repayments, voice messages, being guided as a medium in-training, self-affirmations, astrology therapy sessions, and various forms of New-Age spiritual systems of the time. Whilst photographing the cassettes I found a single thread of her hair in the dust at the bottom of the shoe box… how strange and beautiful it was to touch a physical part of someone I love that left so many years ago. And how strange that, since her death, the sounds of the cassettes have deteriorated, but that thread of hair, that physical part of her, remains unchanged.
and Jazz singer in a process of searching for deeper meaning through spirituality and healing, spanning an unknown period of time around the 1980’s-90’s. For 26 years since her untimely death at 59 years of age, a shoe box with the brand name “Lady X” filled with cassettes has been in the family, in storage. In 2019 I began to go through them and found a humane and rich catalogue of personal recordings and pre-recorded tapes of her work as a musician, answer machine messages and disputes over debt repayments, voice messages, being guided as a medium in-training, self-affirmations, astrology therapy sessions, and various forms of New-Age spiritual systems of the time. Whilst photographing the cassettes I found a single thread of her hair in the dust at the bottom of the shoe box… how strange and beautiful it was to touch a physical part of someone I love that left so many years ago. And how strange that, since her death, the sounds of the cassettes have deteriorated, but that thread of hair, that physical part of her, remains unchanged.
