With Grace and Grit: Helene created a 'chain reaction of inspiration' for mountain artists

This is part three of "With Grace and Grit: A mountain community responds to Helene." Listen to part one here and part 2 here. 

The arts have always been integral to the Appalachian experience. Helene led to a pause in much of the area’s creative output. But six months later, many artists are back at work and incorporating the tragedy into their projects.

Visitors coming into the Ashe County town of Lansing on a two-lane country highway are greeted by a colorful mural. From a wall of CJ’s Market, Ola Belle Reed, Appalachian singer/songwriter and local native, plays her banjo amidst the blues and pinks of a mountain scene.

Reed and the mural are a testament to the inspiration these hills and small towns have had on their people. Now many of the creators in this region are using their skills to capture the impact of the great storm Helene.

Laurie Wichryk Wilson started making quilts when she was 13, carrying on a long family tradition.

“I love to gift them to people, and I want them to use them and wash them, and they'll get softer and softer and just feel hugged, feel loved, from Laurie,” she says.

Helene displaced tens of thousands of people. It also displaced a lot of artwork, including Wilson’s.

When the floods rose, four of her quilts in a local shop were caught up in the deluge. Two have never been recovered. One was found in a wet heap. And the other one — “It was a baptism in the rough, rough creek,” she says.

Trail walkers noticed the quilt midway up a sycamore tree overhanging Big Horse Creek about two weeks after the storm.

Wilson thought the bedspread would be ruined. It wasn’t.

“It's washed up beautifully. It's useful, it's resilient. As I continue to piece quilts, it makes me think of the community just being patched back together and being a beautiful thing,” she says.

That quilt, with its patriotic design, became part of an exhibit called “Art of Resilience” that ran earlier this year at Florence Thomas Art School in West Jefferson.

“We really wanted to explore unique responses to this collective experience that we all had," says Samantha Oleschuk, the school’s director of community engagement and the one who curated the exhibit. 

Oleschuk says the devastation of Helene led to a chain reaction of inspiration among local artists.

“People lost their studio supplies," she says. "There were lots of materials impacted and completely destroyed with the flooding. There's a lot of landscape photographers here, so they are documenting the beautiful space that we call home, and then to have that landscape completely altered was something that you have to reckon with.”

Artists are not just documenting the experience. Many are giving back at the same time. Asheville-based visual artist Kira Bursky honed her skills in the Blue Ridge and is contributing 20 percent of her sales to the recovery efforts.

She says the storm gave her feelings she had never experienced before.

"After the storm, I honestly was just so flooded with emotions," she says. "I couldn't really think about anything else other than the hurricane, so I just, I kind of just had to create art about it. 

What emerged were stark, wilting forms rendered in blacks and whites and grays, capturing the sadness and exhaustion of the times. There’s a collection of them framed in wood reclaimed after the storm by Andrew Villiers.

Bursky’s work has received rave reviews online, and she’s enjoyed sharing memories and experiences of the storm with her followers. But her focus is on the future of the areas struck by Helene. 

“There was a time where national media was looking at Lansing and Asheville, and then the attention goes away," she says. "And so there's that fear of like, you know, 'Are we forgotten?' We still need help. We're still rebuilding. And hearing that again and again is just adding fuel to my fire to share my art so that the narrative, the stories of our towns, is not forgotten.” 

National artists are also contributing to the Helene recovery effort. Concert for Carolina, held in Charlotte in October, raised more than $24 million. It was headlined by noted musicians with Tar Heel roots including Luke Combs, James Taylor and Eric Church.

Church, a Western North Carolina native who graduated from Appalachian State University, has also pledged to build 40 homes in areas devastated by Helene.