Nine creatures from Northwest legend seem ready to pass judgment on all who enter their chamber.
The effect, something like a spirit-world supreme court, can be a bit overpowering for Bill Rutherford. And he’s the man who carved them.
The masks will be on display through Aug. 25 at the Fort Vancouver Visitor Center. Better there than at his house, he said. Rutherford doesn’t to see those eyes staring at him in his home.
“Would you?”
One mask was the most personal, he said. It represents a river spirit, Itcixyan.
“I envision this thing grabbing my brother,” Rutherford said.
Also known as the Swallowing Monster, it personifies his brother’s drowning death in 1973.
“Itcixyan took my brother Earle, while he swam in the Columbia River at Sauvie Island,” Rutherford, 81, said. “His body was recovered five days later.”
Itcixyan (pronounced It-chish-yan) was not part of the game plan when he began his project in 2015. He started with one firm concept: the iconic Columbia Gorge image of She Who Watches.
The other eight were inspired by a book about Chinookan legends, including “various monsters not associated with particular animals,” he said.
The Swallowing Monster “started out as more of a fish image, then more like a marine creature with five tentacles,” he said.
It’s tough to carve a mythological creature to scale, by the way.
Carving darkness
“I made it so it’s the size of a mask; it might be huge.”
Other masks had their own challenges, such as the Darkness One.
“How do you carve darkness? I put it inside the eyes. The eyes are black.”
His most three-dimensional mask is the wind, with coils of wire emerging from its pursed lips to represent gusts.
“The first three or four times, it looked like vomiting.”
The Eugene, Ore., artist has said that the forms for most of the masks “were dictated by some power outside my control.”
During the seven-month project, he would wonder, “Where did that come from?”
Was he tapping into a spirituality influenced by his own Chickasaw Indian heritage? No, Rutherford says.
“I’m not a spiritual person. People say I am,” he said. But what the mask project and the rest of his work comes down to is one thing. “I make stuff.”
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