An incredibly powerful exhibition opens at the Serpentine Gallery this evening featuring selflessness, spirit and strength.

Rescue: Stories and Portraits of Civilian Rescuers from the February 22 Flood has been a 10-month project for 'storycatcher' Jeanti St Clair and photographer Raimond de Weerdt.

A project that captured the stories of 41 everyday people who selflessly switched into rescue mode on February 28 2022, not thinking about their safety but the safety of those trapped on rooves through Lismore's floodplain and neighbouring towns like Woodburn and Bungawalbin as well as stories from those that gave their homes as places of refuge during Lismore's darkest days.

What Jeanti and Raimond have captured are a series of remarkable stories and powerful photographs that create strong visual images in your mind as you read through everyone's individual scenario.

Take Ben Walder's story as an example.

Ben dropped his wife, two sons and dog off at the Lismore Showground from their North Lismore home in his 4-metre fishing boat.

Ben then went and collected neighbours from tree branches and rooftops, he rescued households of nine people and one business owner, Janet from Totally Dogs with her five dogs when the boat already had a family of five people on board. The dogs were scared and barking at the kids as they made their way to safety.

In another rescue, Ben popped his hamstring at the hip but continued to save more than 40 people in North Lismore and countless dogs and cats.

Ben's is one of 29 stories that grace the walls of Serpentine Gallery and fill you with pride about how incredible our community is.

As Jeanti was setting up the exhibition yesterday, she told the Lismore App, "So many of them (rescuers) said I just did not expect to be doing that on that day. I didn't set out to rescue, I went to take my family to safety. and the next thing I'm rescuing all my neighbours. They're incredible and they're really inspiring as well."

Jeanti points to story about Ann and John who live on Dawson Street in Gerards Hill, "It is really about Girards Hill as much as anything else. It's about all the community that came down from the upper part of that hill and help their neighbours as well."

Jeanti has a history of telling flood stories.

"I did this project in 2017, where I created a set of 10 audio walks where you'd hear the voices of people that were flooded or were involved in the cleanup and they started at The Quad and then they would send you on a walk around while they told you the story. So I had a bit of a profile, I guess as a flood storycatcher. And I use the term storycatcher really deliberately. I let them be the storytellers. I'll catch them and craft them and bring them into media form."

"People said to me within days of the Feb 28 flood, (it's) time for a new flood story Jeanti. I was quite overwhelmed with that proposal, but I knew that it was an important, I guess, offering to the community to try and catch some of the stories and I didn't quite know what to do. Like it seemed so huge. So something did sift to the surface though, something rose up through the mud and silt and everything as we were cleaning that maybe it was the story of the rescuers that needed to be caught."

"It was Australia's largest ever civilian search and rescue operation. And it spontaneously arose out of community. "

"Raimond took my portrait, maybe around April or something, and I thought maybe what we should do is collect their portraits and their stories and we can present them like that. So, we put a call out over Facebook saying we wanted to speak to rescuers and we began with a man called James Todd. We put his photo up and a bit of his story and more people came forward and we ended up with 41 rescuers."

Twenty-nine of those stories are featured in the exhibition.

"I'm sort of hoping people will walk into the space and there'll be drawn to the face of somebody and enter into a story that way. What they will see as they read through more and more of the stories is the connections between some of them. So, people interacted and connected and they'll probably read places that they recognize there'll be mentions of people who were being rescued. There'll be landmarks so you really kind of feel that this is about the Northern Rivers."

On the Serpentine Gallery floor is a tinnie. A banner will descend from the ceiling into the tinnie with the names of all the known rescuers up to the point of printing the banner. It is a five-metre banner, so that gives you an indication of the hundreds of names that you will read on the banner.

"We won't probably ever capture all the names of all the rescuers but we're completely grateful to everybody, including the people who came to the edge of the water just to wrap people in blankets and take them to a car so they could give them something warm and feed them."

"It's been a really profound project and I'm incredibly proud to have partnered with all of these storytellers. I think Rai's photography shows each storyteller. We would do the interview so that they tell their story and then we take the photograph and I feel there is something of that story in each of the photographs.

Raimond explained his part in the project.

"It was quite an emotional one. In terms of photography, it was a very special kind of a way because these people had just shared their story and then very quickly, I would have to photograph them. So, it's the first time you kind of have an opportunity to photograph someone who is actually quite emotional. And as you can see, some of the portraits you can see the emotions really showing through."

"I did work out a kind of lighting style to kind of have uniformity, so the lighting in most of them is all the same."

"I feel really privileged to have been part of this particular show."

Jeanti knows that this will be a tough space for those that have been traumatised by the events of February 2022.

"There will be mental health support tools around the gallery, there will be some handouts with some really simple exercises that can really help calm the nervous system. Most of the volunteers at the Serpentine Gallery have done this wonderful half-day training program with Lifeline called Accidental Counsellor so they're all aware that this is a really emotional, powerful exhibition.

Rescue: Stories and Portraits of Civilian Rescuers from the February 22 Flood opens tonight at the Serpentine Gallery, 104 Conway Street (just down from Lifeline) at 5pm and runs until March 18.

Serpentine Gallery is open Monday to Friday 10am to 4pm and Saturday 10am to 2pm.