Meet the Artist: Donna Rutherford
Remembering Together: East Renfrewshire have appointed their artist to co-create memorials with communities. Meet Donna Rutherford.
As a socially-engaged artist I create a distinctive mix of documentary; personal storytelling; humour; psychology and folklore alongside social and political history. Producing theatre and video work since 1990, I cross the roles of writer, performer, video maker and director. My faith in people’s stories is so strong my practice merges commissioned work with community-based projects. I now create open call-outs for contributors - encouraging participants to become archivists of their own life story.
The work manages to make difficult subjects such as displacement, family relations, ageing, and miscommunication in relationships, accessible to a wide audience while developing innovative forms of personal storytelling.
Donna Rutherford
Donna says: Through a series of conversations with local residents we will gather the experiences that truly mattered to people during the pandemic. As an independent artist I find I can generate a very different dialogue with folk, where we can extract powerful narratives, demonstrating the bigger picture of human nature, survival and local environments. I always work with ideas, themes and (personal) stories first, then find the appropriate format to make those stories accessible to an audience. This seems to be the ideal process for the Remembering Together project, as we explore exactly what the end memorial can be.
I often work with the keywords Change; Choice; Control; Confidence, and again these words seem very relevant to people’s recent experiences. I am also interested in the shift in meaning of certain words during the pandemic - Being ‘Positive’ now has such a Negative connotation!
Undoubtedly one of the most horrendous things was not being allowed to support the sick and the dying or to say a proper farewell, before or after actual death. Together we will find ways to represent those small acts of kindness that we did achieve, like leaving a bowl of soup on a neighbour’s front step.
The Covid pandemic highlighted the inherent health disparities across communities. It will be important to try to unify an area like East Renfrewshire where prosperity and poverty are never far from each other. The lockdown slogan ‘All in the Same Boat’ would have been viewed very differently from household to household – previously simple matters of having a garden or not having a garden, grew into contentious issues, alongside the realities of not being able to work from home.