Flood Line

My studio in New Orleans remained underwater for over 6 weeks due to the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. All my sketches and photographs taken over the past 25 years were submerged in the murky underworld. I managed to save some of these washed out images by carefully peeling them apart before air drying them on a friend’s back porch in Sunshine, Louisiana.

I wanted to create a personal testament relating to this disaster and finding a way to preserve the rapidly deteriorating photographs became a priority.

I began mounting the photographs onto 4 foot long substrate sections before encasing them in several layers of hot wax. The wax preserved the remains of the washed out images and gave the individual photographs a sense of being separated from the present as if they were suspended in time.

I laid a curtain of recycled Mardi Gras beads, also salvaged from the flood, over the photographs, creating a sense of intimacy and resembling a Flood Line of water found on the hundreds of thousands of homes effected by this disaster. To date,  70 feet of Flood Line is completed. Thanks to Marcel Wisznia 25ft is now permanently installed at the Union Lofts in New Orleans, courtesy of Marcel Wisznia.

jkl April 2007