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Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/421959
92 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 12.14 ichael Ratterman plunges his hand into a crusty bowl and grabs a white brick. It's a book, Don DeLillo's White Noise, the cover barely visible under a layer of brittle salt crystals, the artist's chosen medium these days. He looks around the upper level of the garage-style studio beside his house in Irish Hill. A wall-sized door opens onto the back yard. A tricycle and a wagon lie abandoned around an evergreen, signs of Ratterman's two-year-old son, Boone, who stares from a portrait on the wall, face fecked with sand. Downstairs, Ratterman's abstract woodcarv- ings surround worktables, curving STUDIO SHOT Michael Ratterman By Dylon Jones Photo by Aaron Kingsbury "Growing" salt has become an art form for this sculptor/ funeral director. M upward into nothing. Ratterman puts the salty book back and runs his hand along a smooth cherry wood casket he's making with a couple of friends. The 41-year-old day-job funeral director has worked at his family's epony- mous funeral home for 12 years, but his passion is sculpting. He bought his house in 2012 and tore down the ramshackle home next door to build his studio. "This place was basically condemned," he says. Now it's full of salt, crystals growing in beakers and large white tubes, encasing books, long aluminum rods, cotton. White rings hang from the ceiling, line shelves. His work tackles time, change, death, memory — typical concepts for a child of the funeral business. "It's always infuenced my work, just the whole process of death and dying," he says. Life gives way to death, form to formlessness, reality to memory, which fades like the books in brine solution. Ratterman stands on tiptoes to reach a glass jar caked with salt. He holds it over the casket, points out clear stripes where the solution has descended. They are like tree rings, each denoting about a week. A fattened fy sticks to the inside of the glass, wings salty. Ratterman smiles. "I got lucky this bug got in there," he says. "Stuck there. Forever." Ratterman pouring a brine solution into a tube, then dipping a cloth sculptural form that will be coated with salt crystals.