In ‘After the Storm,’ Asheville artist Cleaster Cotton calls upon her past self to help herself and others grieve, process post-Hurricane Helene

Featured photo: “Ooh Wee” by Cleaster Cotton (courtesy photo)

Editor’s note: Cleaster’s first name is pronouned “Klee–Esta” like “fiesta.”

The last thing artist Cleaster Cotton did before Hurricane Helene hit Asheville was fill the raised beds at the youth center’s community garden with soil. 

It was already starting to rain, but that didn’t matter to Cotton, who vigorously emptied pounds of dark, black dirt into the boxes. It was her last act of defiance before the storm devastated her community.

Over the next 24 hours, Cotton watched in visceral horror from her third-floor apartment in the River Arts District as the once beautiful river rose higher and higher, swallowing up everything in its path.

“I literally saw the river coming across the land and taking over cars, vans, trucks and then almost completely the buildings across the street,” Cotton says. “I saw a 40-foot shipping container speed by.”

Cotton, who lives in a collective for artists, stayed and witnessed the devastation firsthand.

“There was a whole night of trauma,” Cotton recalls. “It was pitch black dark, no sound. All of the creatures in nature, all of the white noise was underwater. I couldn’t tell if the river had reached me so I had to keep running to the terrace with a candle to see.”

When the water receded the next day, Cotton’s apartment had been spared, but the other half of the building she lived in had been pummeled. The ground floor had completely flooded and the elevator on her side of the building was inoperable. When she finally managed to go outside and check on the garden, she found that among the devastation, her small act hadn’t been in vain.

“The soil was still there,” she says. “The soil hadn’t moved.”

The actions of her past self, she saw, had planted paths forward for herself in the future. 

As an artist and educator, this kind of call and response to her past, present and future selves has long been a throughline in Cotton’s work. And in her latest exhibit, now on display at Sawtooth School for Visual Art, Cotton unveils how her past self has helped her grieve, feel and process everything that’s happened since the hurricane hit in September.

“After the Storm,” which opened on Jan. 11 and will be up until Feb. 8, uses self-portrait photographs that Cotton took of herself almost two decades ago and recontextualizes them as therapeutic windows for herself and others. First taken in 2006, the high-contrast, black-and-white photos depict close-up shots of Cotton’s face in all kinds of emotional states. 

In “Ooh Wee,” Cotton’s face gets dissected and cast onto two large panels, her eyes barely open, downcast as her right hand cradles her forehead. Her lips form a slight pout, her brow is furrowed. Next to the piece, Cotton has written a reflection from the day after the hurricane.

“Anxiety filled me: churning heat gripped my gut and spoke in a deep, slow, primordial tongue. My throat dried, swallowing became a chore, and hot tears began to flow down my face.”

In “Coming To Terms,” Cotton’s face looks almost distorted, a fish-eye effect creating an unnerving, anxiety-inducing atmosphere as her forehead threatens to break out of the foreground and into the viewer’s realm. Her eyes bulge wide, her mouth is closed in a firm, thin line.

“Life as I knew it was profoundly altered,” Cotton writes in the accompanying short essay. “The healing journey is cyclic, not linear. Just because I feel better today than I did yesterday does not ensure that I will feel even better tomorrow. The uncertainty surrounding the extensive damage, loss of life, and repercussions impacting people, animals, insects, trees and plants is disturbing. Mental management of what I experienced during and after Hurricane Helene is a challenge.”

In the aftermath of the hurricane, Cotton revisited her portraits, something she likened to the opening up of a time capsule, something to return to when the time called for it.

“When I go to one of these pieces, it triggers an emotion within me,” she says. “So I did a lot of crying when I was able to look at these pieces. Some of them are sad emotions, some of them are horrifying emotions, some of them are maybe just questions, confusion.”

When she first took the pictures, Cotton says she invoked the feelings by thinking about other experiences in her life. She wanted the images to be visceral and up until now, hadn’t ever displayed them as a full collection. But when the hurricane hit and she needed a way to process everything, she went back to her old self.

“I placed them in a time capsule so that some time in the future when I needed them most, I could take them out and they would be there for me and others,” she says. 

The exhibit was first shown at Princeton University in October 2024, just weeks after the hurricane. She contemplated cancelling the show, having just experienced a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic event. But instead, she decided to use the event as a grieving exercise and as a way to allow others to also feel their feelings. At the show’s opening, tissue boxes made their rounds and tears flowed freely. Now, in its new temporary home at Sawtooth, Cotton hopes that more people will use the images as a way to connect with their feelings.

“I want to help people get through something that is so big and so intense,” she says. “To look at something and show that it’s okay to let it out and show that part of yourself. To be present rather than keeping it in.”

While she hasn’t scheduled a time or place for the show to return to Asheville, she says that she will eventually bring the works back for her community, which is still very much suffering and in the slow process of rebuilding. But she says that using art as a way to tap into her emotions has been the saving grace for her these last few months. And she wants others to do the same.

“It’s giving yourself permission to feel what you feel,” she says. “Even if you got out, if your place didn’t totally crumble, you still have rights to how you feel. And if you have loved ones who went through this, just listen. Ask them if there’s anything they want to share. Everybody who witnessed, experienced this, we all deserve our feelings and deserve to have loving, caring people who can hear us.”

And even if it’s not today or tomorrow or the next day, Cotton says that Asheville will rebuild.

“Time will go by, and it will begin to lessen the pain,” she says. “Spring will come, and things will grow and we will get through it.”

“After the Storm” is on display at Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem through Feb. 8. Learn more about Cotton on her website at cleaster-cotton.pixels.com or by following her on Instagram at @cleastercotton.