Geo (Gio) Rutherford

And what we have left is these giant salt flats.

Most lakes in the world die because of evaporation or drought, but also rivers are carrying sediment, which gets dropped into these lake bodies.

Even our Great Lakes here, Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, they have rivers bringing sediment in that end up filling them in.

And over time, you end up losing your valley or your lake bed.

And you end up with a bog or a fen or one of these different types of wetlands.

There is a clarification between the difference between these different types of wetlands.

But in a lot of cases, a bog is created from like a body of water that has kind of transformed or evolved into its next phase of life.

Like if you talk about like the life and death of a lake, you know, how it begins and how it ends, a lot of times it ends up as this like boggy wetland.

Yeah, I've gotten really lucky to be able to combine all these interests that I have into what I do now.

I feel so blessed.

But I did my undergrad in printmaking and fibers and then I spent five years being a high school teacher.

But then I decided to go to grad school and I went to grad school for printmaking again.

And while I was doing that at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, it was the first time that I had ever lived like within seven blocks of a Great Lake.

I started to just go to Lake Michigan every day.

For 90 days, I went to Bradford Beach, which if you don't know, if you're not from Milwaukee, it's like kind of a nasty little beach, but I love it.

And I didn't know what I was doing there at first.

I started to just collect things that I found.

There's a lot of plastic and interesting artifacts that end up on the shoreline, which kind of tell you a story about what's going on with the Great Lakes.

So like invasive mussel shells, rusty crayfish claws, things where you're starting to put together a story of what's happening.

And I started to do tons of research into the Great Lakes.