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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: Spooky Lakes
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WEBSITE: https://www.georutherford.com/
CITY: Sauk City
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COUNTRY: United States
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PERSONAL
Daughter of academics.
EDUCATION:Eastern Michigan University, B.F.A.; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Artist and educator. Chelsea High School, Chelsea, MI, art teacher, worked for five years; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, adjunct lecturer, 2021; Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, visual arts director. Cochair of the #whyyoumatter nonprofit. Exhibition: “Geo Rutherford: On the Threshold of the Great Lakes,” Rahr West Art Museum, Manitowoc, WI, 2021; “Approaching Water,” Constellation Studios, Lincoln, NE, 2022.
AVOCATIONS:Limnology.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2024, review of Spooky Lakes: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes That Dot Our Planet.
ONLINE
Geo Rutherford website, https://www.georutherford.com (February 2, 2025).
John Michael Kohler Arts Center website, https://www.jmkac.org/ (February 2, 2025), author profile.
River Alliance of Wisconsin website, https://wisconsinrivers.org/ (December 6, 2022), Stacy Harbaugh, “Geo Rutherford’s Artwork Tells the Story of the Great Lakes.”
Sun Times, https://thesuntimesnews.com/ (October 23, 2024), Delaney Krause, “From Chelsea High School Art Teacher to Viral Tik Tok Sensation.”
WBUR website, https://www.wbur.org/ (October 1, 2024), Peter O’Dowd and Gabrielle Healy, “TikTok Star Geo Rutherford Teaches Us about Spooky Lakes, from Lake Superior to Lake Baikal.”
Geo Rutherford is an artist and educator who transitioned into the publishing world after a career dedicated to art education. She currently serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is the Visual Arts Director at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. Geo’s fascination with lakes, initially sparked by her artistic practice, gained widespread attention when she began sharing on TikTok. Her engaging videos, which delve into the science behind phenomena like unusual ice formations and drifting islands, quickly captivated a global audience. However, her account truly took off when she started her popular “Spooky Lakes” series in October of 2020. Today, she frequently receives messages from teachers and parents who appreciate her educational content that inspires kids to explore science, history and environmental causes.
Beyond "Spooky Lakes," Geo's artistic practice is centered on environmental issues related to the Great Lakes. She creates prints, artist’s books, and large-scale mixed media works that explore themes of invasiveness, impermanence, and the unseen aspects of the Great Lakes ecosystem. Geo holds a BFA from Eastern Michigan University and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to her academic role, she co-chairs the #whyyoumatter nonprofit in her spare time.
Geo currently resides on a spooky lake in Sauk City, Wisconsin, with her dog, Padfoot.
Geo Rutherford’s artwork tells the story of the Great Lakes
Dec 6, 2022 | Aquatic Invasive Species, Lakes
Geo Rutherford collects found objects on a Great Lakes beach
Through her art, Geo Rutherford tells the stories of the Great Lakes. Like any good novel, these stories include some good guys, some bad guys, and a long plot arc with lively imagery.
Whether or not she’s telling the Great Lakes story in book form, however, is one of the more controversial things about her work. Each Beach Finds collection from places like Manitowoc and Muskegon looks like a box of test tubes filled with artifacts from her beach walks.
Beach Finds is a "book" that you use to read the story of a Great Lakes beach“One of the first things I made was an artist’s book and my TikTok video about it went viral,” said Geo. “It got around 1.6 million views and a lot of comments from people saying it wasn’t a book. Beach Finds asks the question, ‘what is a book?’ What if it has no pages, no spine or cover, but all the elements act like a book? You look at it and turn the tubes over like a page, one by one. And by the time you’ve gone through the tubes, you have a full narration of the beach through the materials and labels. You don’t need an art degree to connect with it. The action of experiencing it will give you clues to understanding a Great Lakes beach’s story.”
At first glance, Geo may seem like a very creative beachcomber. Driven by curiosity, her collections of man-made and natural objects from Great Lakes beaches began as a 90-day artist’s walk while working on graduate studies in printmaking and fiber arts. Her exhibits include displays of clear tubes filled with collections from her beach walks as well as prints, collages, and installations that evoke the replication of invasive species.
Rutherford's collected objects from Great Lakes beaches
“I had no intention of collecting found objects,” she remembers. “I chose the Great Lakes as a topic for my master’s degree, but I was overwhelmed with where to start. The daily visit to the beach in the fall of 2019 helped me be present and observe the changes on the shore. I started to collect things as I realized how much was hidden in the detritus on the beach. When the Great Lakes push up materials, you can’t help but notice things like the perfect balls of dune roots or the hundreds of monarch butterflies that die in the fall. Then I started to collect plastic. Now I get more excited about plastic than anything.”
Geo Rutherford with a bottle of plastic nurdles collected on a Great Lakes beach
Her excitement isn’t a happy one. She’s deeply aware of the problems the Great Lakes are facing, from plastic pollution to invasive species and climate change. She describes her collections of plastic, slag glass, and crinoid fossils as the water’s evidence of both the damning man-made interventions in nature that exist alongside remnants of the pre-Anthropocene world. As she collects and sorts found objects into large and small tubes, she slowly creates a library of shorelines’ stories.
“Each beach is different,” said Geo. “You’d be shocked how different. Each beach has unique problems. Lake Erie has a lot of brick and glass. It has the biggest waves that bring up the best junk. Lake Superior is more natural. It’s the last to be touched by much plastic pollution. But there was a time when a train car that was carrying nurdles derailed. Nurdles are microplastic industrial pellets that are melted down to make plastic products. They float and rise to the top of the sand, so you can find them on the beach. My sister and I spent six hours collecting nurdles. That collection was a moment in time recorded on the beach.”
Rutherford with parents
Geo’s appreciation of water didn’t begin with the Great Lakes. Her parents, now retired academics in earth science and economics, traveled and moved a lot as Geo grew up. Her summers were spent on the Atlantic shores of Ocean City, New Jersey. Her mother called her a water baby because Geo was fearless in the ocean. Her love of swimming continued through body surfing, water polo, and visits to what she describes as a “gnarly” reservoir where she lived near Boulder, Colorado. Those experiences helped her appreciate the freshwater of the Great Lakes now that she is a young adult.
Her artistic spark didn’t happen until she was a young teen when her manga sketches got the attention of her friends. Her early attempts at painting weren’t great, she admits. It was her commitment to practicing skills that eventually led her to study printmaking.
Now she balances teaching, creating exhibits, and producing lively content for social media. While she thinks she would have been a good middle school science teacher, she’s doing a lot to educate and entertain people through her science-centered work, including creating videos for TikTok that explain complex science (like this one about how cargo ships introduced invasive species into the Great Lakes), share what she’s finding on her beach walks (including this one from Lake Michigan), or show the process and meaning behind her artwork (like this one that shows the work that goes into creating a lithograph).
Geo Rutherford with her sister at Lake Erie
“Sometimes it feels like I’m not doing enough,” said Geo. “I do think my art is a form of activism, and having exhibits in public spaces and creating content for TikTok is doing a good job of communicating what’s going on in the Great Lakes. But I don’t see myself as cleaning the beach or making an impact on pollution. Activism, to me, would mean working with the communities of people impacted by the Great Lakes, who live near the lakes and experience the lakes. Something I’m thinking about, but haven’t done yet, is hosting a beach clean-up day. It feels more participatory and more like activism if a group of people go to their local beach to clean it up.”
Overall, Geo is optimistic about our waters’ future. She believes that we can harness the power of technology to solve pollution problems. She also feels that it’s realistic to expect that people in the future will be more concerned about how we use the limited freshwater resources than Great Lakes’ ecosystems. Geo was very influenced by Dan Egan’s book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. Egan writes about how nature has been able to recover and respond to disasters, but that timeline doesn’t line up with the instant gratification of human expectations.
“We can look at the invasive zebra and quagga mussels’ population that exploded in the mid-2000s. We now see their shells all over the beaches and they cleaned the water so thoroughly that they almost killed themselves off. There is an ebb and flow of species and how nature responds. How we deal with the whiplash we’re seeing with climate change feels like we are putting a bandaid on the issues, or are we responding to a problem with answers to clean it up instead of changing the behavior that’s causing it.”
Find Geo’s work on the web at georutherford.com. Follow her on Instagram @someprintlife and on TikTok @geodesaurus.
– Stacy Harbaugh, Communications Director
From Chelsea High School Art Teacher to Viral Tik Tok Sensation: Spooky Lake Month with Geo Rutherford
October 23, 2024 by Delaney Krause
Former Chelsea teacher Geo Rutherford combines art, science, and spooky lake tales to captivate millions on TikTok.
Photo courtesy of Geo Rutherford
Umm yes hello, it’s Spooky Lake Month! For avid Tik Tok users, this catchphrase might ring a bell; former Chelsea High School art teacher, Geo Rutherford, has coined this as the opening to each of her videos during the month of October.
Her Tik Tok account has amassed more than 1.7 million followers, and for the 31 days of October, Geo highlights a different national or international lake and its more haunting and morbid qualities– which she refers to as “haunted hydrology”. What started as a passion project and a way to fill time in 2020, has quickly grown into a viral phenomenon, and as of this year, a published book as well.
Page 85&86 of “Spooky Lakes” Illustration of Lake Baikal; The illustration is inspired by Japanese propaganda artwork by Utagawa Kokunimasa. Photo courtesy of Geo Rutherford
After parting ways with the Chelsea School District in 2019, Geo pursued higher education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee for the second part of her graduate degree in art. Geo credits her thesis topic with really driving home her passion for limnology, the study of inland waters.
She explained, “My whole 75-page thesis was about going to the beaches and collecting material and spending time on the shores, and how that collection ended being evidence to what was going on with the Great Lakes.”
Page 77&80 of “Spooky Lakes” Lake Guatavita; An imagined illustration of the golden chief, holding a gold tunjo in the shape of a snake. Photo courtesy of Geo Rutherford.
She posted videos about this project, and it was actually what first went viral on her Tik Tok account. She continued, “It’s all kind of full circle; I started Tik Tok because of the Great Lakes, I started sharing educational content because of the Great Lakes, and then I just sort of snuck into other lakes by accident.”
As a result of her early Tik Tok success, and the increased free-time in 2020, Geo made the somewhat impulsive decision to post a video every day in October about haunted hydrology. She chuckles at this first installation of Spooky Lake Month saying, “I didn’t have a plan. Those videos are so embarrassing because they are very chaotic; which I think was a product of 2020, and also a 35-year-old trying to figure out what to do on the Internet.” Regardless, Spooky Lake has only grown in quality and reach since this first year.
Page 12&13 of “Spooky Lakes” Illustration of Lake Superior. Photo courtesy of Geo Rutherford.
According to Geo, “2021 was kind of the first banger, successful year for Spooky Lake Month.” It was in the aftermath of this installation that Geo received interest for publishing a book. She explained, “I had multiple literary agents reach out to me, so I was kind of guided through the process. I had to make a proposal that I then handed over to a group of publishers, who essentially fought over it.”
After deciding to partner with Abrams Books, Geo began the official book writing and illustrating process; it took around two-years to complete the book from start to finish. True to her artistic passion, Geo explained “the writing aspect was so hard for me, so the painting ended up being a creative relief after all of the procrastinating and writing.” As of September 2024, the official “Spooky Lakes” book is available for purchase online and in stores, along with stickers (artwork done by Geo) and other Spooky Lake merchandise.
Spooky Lake Month has opened countless doors for Geo and her artwork. When asked about her favorite part of finding social media success, Geo explained, “I like that I was weirdly able to do this thing in my life where I combined the things that I think are the most fun: art, science, education, lakes, and horror. It was like a weird marriage of all of my favorite things.”
Most importantly, she credits her rise to social media success with providing her the opportunity to be “a working artist.” She is also very proud that her success has afforded her the ability to give back; “I’m super excited this year because we are donating all of the funds (around $7,000) from my creator fund to the Hurricane Helene efforts.”
In the end, Geo celebrates “how people can use the Internet in a positive way” and intends to continue to spread her passion alongside this positivity. The fifth installation of Spooky Lake Month is more than half over, but the “Spooky Lakes” book and merchandise can be purchased year-round.
Dive into the haunted histories of the Great Lakes and other international inland bodies of water– the mysteries lurking beneath the surfaces (like the acidic qualities of Lake Natron and the alien-like extremophiles of Lake Vostok) are sure to make your hair stand up.
Also, be sure to check out Geo on Tik Tok or Instagram @geodesaurus!
TikTok star Geo Rutherford teaches us about spooky lakes, from Lake Superior to Lake Baikal
09:04
Resume
October 01, 2024
Peter O'DowdGabrielle Healy
The cover of "Spooky Lakes" and author Geo Rutherford. (Courtesy of Kelly Kennedy and Harry N. Abrams)
The cover of "Spooky Lakes" and author Geo Rutherford. (Courtesy of Kelly Kennedy and Harry N. Abrams)
Lakes are spooky. That’s something Geo Rutherford knows well.
Rutherford is a TikTok sensation with more than 1.7 million followers. Her videos focus on lakes around the world with eerie histories.
WBUR is a nonprofit news organization. Our coverage relies on your financial support. If you value articles like the one you're reading right now, give today.
But Rutherford isn’t just a social media star. The writer and illustrator just released a book based on her popular series, "Spooky Lakes: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes that Dot Our Planet."
The book details a number of lakes across the world that Rutherford dubs ‘spooky.’ One lake featured in the book is Pitch Lake in Trinidad. The lake is a giant pit of asphalt that is used for harvesting asphalt to this day. The lake’s surface isn’t liquid, and people can walk across it. But when warmed by the sun, the surface becomes sticky like glue.
“It's spooky because it can catch people,” Rutherford says. “There's all of these bones and artifacts that have been uncovered from the pitch, from the tar, inside of the lake and kind of has this history of archeology that's been preserved in it.”
8 questions with Geo Rutherford
What makes a lake spooky? Why is Lake Superior included but other lakes like Lake George are not?
“Spooky lakes are not about ghosts and ghouls or the supernatural, but actually about just the natural world being spooky all by herself, and just the strange things that happen in the natural world along with human interaction and environmental disasters and the way that we interact with these waters, which is what makes Lake Superior so spooky because there are hundreds of shipwrecks in that lake and thousands of people have died there. So it's a very spooky lake because it holds onto her dead.”
Tell us about the Jacuzzi of Death, a set of lakes filled with brine.
“The Gulf of Mexico is pitted with these deep-sea pools of brine and salt, which makes them more dense and heavier than the surrounding water, so they have a halocline — a little edge — that kind of delineates them from the surrounding saltwater.
“They're anoxic, which means they don't have any dissolved oxygen, which makes them deadly to all of the marine life that depend on dissolved oxygen to breathe. So if a creature falls in or wanders in without knowing what would happen, they can end up suffocating.”
You say that Lake Baikal in Eastern Russia is one of the spookiest lakes out there. Why?
“It's the oldest and deepest lake in the world: 25 million years old and over 5,000 feet deep, which means it's over a mile deep. It is a wild lake.
“80% of the creatures that live in Baikal can only be found there, and they have the only exclusively freshwater seal in the world. We have no idea how it even got there in the middle of Siberia.”
What other kinds of creatures are down there?
“There are all sorts of crazy little creatures that live there. There's a blind, white, little creepy fish called golomyankas which is rumored to, if you lift it up out of the depths of Lake Baikal and into the sunlight, it'll just melt in your hand.
“So there are all sorts of weird creatures that can only be found there.”
Can you talk about Spirit Lake in Washington and how it was transformed by the eruption of Mount St. Helens?
“Mount St. Helens was a lateral eruption, which means that half of the mountain kind of collapsed and it exploded outwards instead of up. And there was a massive landslide into the nearby Spirit Lake, which resulted in a 600-foot tidal wave that washed across the lake and tore all of these enormous trees down from the surrounding hills and sucked them back into the lake.
“It totally changed the shape of the lake. And now today, there are tens of potentially thousands of these trees still in the lake today — bleached, smoothed out and enormous — and they've never been removed because they're kind of preserved for scientific study.”
How did it feel to visit Spirit Lake?
“I was surprised at how spooky the Mount St. Helen's Park was. I had never been there before. We had to kind of go out of our way to try to get there because a lot of the roads have been taken out by landslides. So for the entire day that we were there, we only saw about six people.
“Nobody's there. None of the buildings are open. All of the signs have kind of been left to and forgotten about. And the path is overgrown. We didn't see a single other person. It was quiet. And then when we reached the lake, it was these enormous trees.
“I'm 6 foot 3. And these were like humongous trees that were taller than me. The width of them was much taller than I am. And they're just perched on the edge of the lake and we weren't even close to the largest part of the mat, which is where all the trees are in the water. We were just experiencing the trees that were only on the shore and they completely surround the entire lake.”
Why do you think people gravitate toward your TikTok content?
“I feel like it hasn't been explored that much on the internet before, this specific niche of spooky waters of the world and lakes specifically. I think we've always explored oceans, but who knew that lakes could be so strange and spooky?”
What’s the next stop on your spooky lakes bucket list?
“I need to go to Yellowstone National Park.
“All of the lakes in that national park are so spooky. So I definitely got to go there.”
Geo Rutherford
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Geo Rutherford is an American artist, educator, and TikToker based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.[1] She considers herself to be a hobbyist limnologist.[2]
Early life and education
Rutherford was raised in Boulder, Colorado and Dexter, Michigan.[1][3] Her mother had a PhD in geology (which was the inspiration for Rutherford's first name) and taught at Eastern Michigan University.[2][3]
Rutherford first took a printmaking class in middle school,[4] but didn't become passionate about art until high school.[3]
After earning a bachelor's degree in art education at Eastern Michigan University,[5] Rutherford worked as a high school art teacher in Chelsea, Michigan for five years.[1][5][6] Although she enjoyed the job, she returned to graduate school in 2019 in hopes of finding a teaching job that paid better.[6] She attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts.[1][3] Her graduate thesis show, which she exhibited in May 2021, focused on the Great Lakes.[7][5]
In 2021, she worked as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.[5]
Art
Rutherford is a printmaker and book artist.[4][8]
Many of Rutherford's pieces are related to the environment and climate change.[4][8] One of her inspirations is beach trash, which she collects for some of her prints and found object works.[3][4][5][8] She particularly likes using glass tubes, which she fills with found objects.[6][5]
In 2021 she had a solo exhibition, entitledGeo Rutherford: On the Threshold of the Great Lakes at Rahr West Art Museum in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.[8] The following year, she was included in the exhibition Approaching Water at Constellation Studios in Lincoln, Nebraska.[9]
Online presence
Rutherford began posting on TikTok after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.[2][3] She began posting about her art and about the Great Lakes, which would become a frequent subject.[1][2] Her first video on the Great Lakes, and second video ever, was posted in August 2020 and received 4 million views.[1][7] More largely, Rutherford's TikToks tend to focus on hydrology.[1]
As of October 2023, Rutherford had 1.6 million followers on TikTok.[2]
Rutherford has an annual series, Spooky Lake Month, which takes place in October.[3] During the month, Rutherford posts a new video on a "haunted hydrology" story each day.[7][2] Rutherford has said she tries to avoid topics like true crime, conspiracies, or the supernatural in her content, and to instead focus on centering the environment and the power of nature.[2][5]
Book
In 2022, Rutherford signed a book deal for Spooky Lakes, a middle-school non-fiction book which she wrote and illustrated herself.[2][3] The book is set to release in late 2024 through Abrams.[10]
Geo Rutherford creates prints, artist’s books and large-scale mixed media works focusing on environmental issues impacting the Great Lakes. She received a BFA from Eastern Michigan University and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Geo taught High School art in Chelsea, Michigan for 5 years but now is the Art Director at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, running the #WhyYouMatter non-profit, an adjunct lecturer at UWM and exhibiting work around the Midwest. Currently, she lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her dog, Padfoot.
Geo Rutherford’s work explores notions of invasiveness, impermanence, and the unseen in relation to the Great Lakes. The transparent waters are a deceptive indicator of the health of the ecosystems below the surface. With climate change, invasive species, and polluted waters, the lakes are quickly devolving into a water desert at the heart of North America. Her practice includes researching the history of the lakes, taking field notes while on visits to Lake Michigan and spending hours on the beach, observing the waters and collecting, amongst others, man-made remnants found in the sand
Rutherford, Geo SPOOKY LAKES Abrams (Children's None) $24.99 9, 24 ISBN: 9781419770531
A gallery of wonders and mysteries in 25 lakes worldwide.
Spun off from the author's ongoing series of TikTok videos, these visits to a select few of our planet's estimated 304 million lakes feature glimpses of eerie shipwrecks, sudden eruptions of toxic gas, and unexpected residents such as the 10-foot-long bull sharks in Lake Nicaragua--all designed to "give you goose bumps on your arms and chills up your spine." Readers are likely to come away equally impressed by the sheer variety of what's in the lakes she presents, from water-filled ones such as Russia's Lake Baikal and the hot springs of Yellowstone, to lakes of lava and pitch, the seriously radioactive waste in Lake Karachay in the Urals, and Lake Natron in Tanzania, which is so hot and toxic that any hapless creatures falling in "are petrified, dried out, and made crispy." Along with going for the gusto, she explores the distinctive history and geology of each site, backing up her assertions with substantial lists of sources at the end. If her decision to illustrate the entries with painted scenes rather than photographs makes these locales seem a little less real, it does allow her the opportunity to provide cutaway views, as well as stimulating explosions, visible fumes, the occasional clutching hand, and other drama-enhancing details. Human figures are rare but racially diverse.
A chilling but thrilling primer for budding limnologists. (author's note, glossary, index) (Informational picture book. 8-10)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Rutherford, Geo: SPOOKY LAKES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332973/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bd2f765c. Accessed 10 Nov. 2024.