HURRICANED THINGS

The Detritus of Disasters

Some background about this series of paintings:

I painted this series in response to the almost incomprehensible devastation from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. These paintings show the tossed-about pieces of things that used to be part of people's lives. The once working parts of lawnmowers or dolls…or whatever…that got ripped away by the wind and water—they are the detritus of disaster…what is left after the storm. Landfills brimming with them—miles of piles of stuff that once was. There is, for me, a sad beauty and poignancy about it all. 

I was born in Michigan and now I live in Vermont (which is not well known for anything but some serious snow and ice). I do, however, happen to live with a man who grew up in from New Orleans. He has always known floods and hurricanes but Hurricane Katrina (and the flood that followed) was so devastating that New Orleans will never be the same. I watched him crumble as his beloved city was ripped apart and drowned.

Months after Katrina, we decided to make a trip down there. We toured the devastation, not just in New Orleans itself but on the Gulf Coast to the east and to the west where whole towns were erased by the vicious winds of Rita.  After days of this we were becoming numbed by the piles of belonging that had been removed from the houses and dragged out onto the street in front of each home. Family photographs, antiques, children’s toys, clothing, appliances, furniture, lawnmowers, wallpaper, curtains—stained, mildewed, smashed and jumbled together, or carted out and dumped.  All of the contents of a home and garage—even the family cars—had become instant refuse.

When you multiply that amount of debris from a single home by hundreds of thousands of homes, businesses, churches and schools, you can begin to imagine the scale of the landfill operations necessary to get it under control.  In some horrible way, seeing a huge landfill of just a single category (trees, bricks, cars, 2x4s, even lawn tractors) reminded me of photos I have seen of the macabre piles of clothing, suitcases and furniture that the Nazis matter-of-factly collected from millions of their murder victims.

And so it is with disasters.  One’s most precious possessions go hurtling through the air or are consumed by flood waters, later to be “cleaned up” and piled in landfills.  The objects, now useless and soon to be buried, sometimes look like they almost might be just fine if the owner came along and picked them up, unbent the bent parts, dusted off the dirt.  Maybe that grill would still work if….  But no, these landfills are morgues.  And when I saw a huge pile of landfilled lawnmowers it brought to mind the thousands of swing set, grills and picnic tables that must have accumulated in their own sad piles elsewhere.

These paintings are my small, personal memorials to what once was.

Lynn Rupe