Rooted: LC native Rachel Rhoden reconnects to home, family through new exhibit
Published 5:37 pm Thursday, July 14, 2022
- “Landscape with Bridge,” by Georgia Morel Reed.
Family photos, a few very brief histories, mementos and paint combine to create “Rooted: Family Legacies in Lake Charles.” This display is on exhibit now at Historic City Hall. Artist and Lake Charles native Rachel Rhoden uses the mixed media to highlight familial life in 1918 Lake Charles.
“It began as a personal healing process,” she writes about the photographs of ancestors Adolph James Kuttner and Rosa Lux Kuttner, Harold Edwards, Irma Kuttner Morel, Leo “Tuggie” Morel Jr. and Georgia Morel Reed.
In a blog on vocal.media, “Threading the Needle,” Rhoden talks about her supportive parents and the love of her Lake Charles home. She was amazed to find later in life the comfort of kindred spirits and location in which she felt equally at home, Gardiner, Mont., a small town at the North entrance of Yellowstone National Park.
However, in July 2020, a fire claimed an important gathering place in Montana. In August, she watched footage of Laura’s destruction.
“I was heartbroken,” she writes. “In a matter of weeks, both of my homes had faced great tragedies and were shadows of their former selves.”
She returned to Lake Charles for about a month after Hurricane Laura.
“After the severe damage to both Gardiner and Lake Charles, I had a bit of an identity crisis,” Rhoden admitted. “The two places in which I felt most rooted — I’ve lived many places —had sort of been taken away from me, or at least the versions that I was used to. So the creative solution was to make or assemble something that reconnected myself to the feeling of “home.” The hope was that it would not only be an emotional catharsis for myself, but that it would be something that other community members connected with as well. It ended up being a project that not only helped me to reconnect with my birthplace, but with people from my past both alive and gone.”
Rhoden now lives in Seattle, but will return to Yellowstone for about a month to help with some creative projects to bring tourism back to Gardiner. Gardiner, like Lake Charles, was impacted by more than one disaster. The most recent is a 500-year flood event.
