(From left) #1, #13, and #43. Lauren Rutten, artist
By Gina Malone
While pitching in to clean up devastated Marshall after Helene, photographer Lauren Rutten couldn’t help but notice some of the finer details in the chaos. “I was in an exterior stairwell [at Marshall High Studios] and noticed waves of silt on the floor leading into the brick wall,” she says. “That’s the river; it’s still here; it’s left its mark. These are the thoughts that ran through my mind as I instinctively reached for my phone to snap a photograph.” As she continued the clean-up process, she began documenting the images that moved her. “All day long, I was noticing and photographing little bits of surfaces that carried both the beauty and tragedy of what we were dealing with. The project gradually became less about Helene alone and more about the questions disasters leave behind. What do we want to hold onto? How do we care for one another? How do we carry grief? What stories will we tell a year from now? Ten years from now?”
Beginning Friday, September 25, with an opening reception from 5–8 p.m., the Madison County Arts Council presents a new exhibition of Rutten’s abstract, large-scale photographs titled Save This Piece. Visitors to the gallery will be invited to contribute their own written reflections to the exhibition. “It is the first public presentation of approximately 24 of the large original photographs, but it also introduces visitors to the broader vision of the project: photographs, community writings and participatory elements that will eventually become a book and larger body of work,” says Rutten, who will present an artist talk on Friday, October 16, at 7 p.m. The community’s more than 150 written contributions will remain with the exhibition through its closing date of November 14.
Each of the photographs has a numerical title. The work #13 came into being when Rutten’s friend Trish Marshall was cleaning rusted letterpress trays from her studio after it had flooded. “The dark rectangular forms are letterpress spacers that left ghost-like impressions across the rusted surface,” says Rutten. “Knowing these small pieces once helped hold words in place, I couldn’t help seeing them as fragments of language scattered by the flood and feeling suspended between collapse and order. I was immediately drawn to the unexpected beauty of this ordinary object transformed by disaster.” Each archival pigment print is finished with hand-drawn 24-karat gold leaf lines referencing the rivers and creeks that flooded as well as concepts of repairing what is broken.
Rutten wants the gathered words to appear like “whispers” alongside the photographs. The exhibition will also include a new writing prompt so that visitors can take a moment for reflection and contribute their thoughts.
“I hope visitors leave feeling both the weight of what was lost and a renewed awareness of what remains,” Rutten says. “The exhibition isn’t ultimately about destruction. It’s about our remarkable capacity to notice beauty, to care for one another and to continue making meaning after events that forever change a place.”
The Madison County Arts Center is located at 90 South Main Street, Marshall. Learn more at MadisonCountyArts.com. Works by Lauren Rutten are also available at Flow Gallery, 14 South Main Street, Marshall.
