May 31, 2006

This is my submission to Images, the exhibit for Open Hearts/Helping Hands project. This exhibit is about works which were made in response to the hurricanes and their aftermath.

Here is my artist statement about the piece. It is entitled, "Into the Void".
Dimensions: 29 wide by 23 long

This piece is entitled: “Into the Void”. If you have ever been through a hurricane, you will never forget the eerie silence as the eye of the storm passes over. After going through the noise and chaos of the howling wind and rain, the silence feels unnatural and the return to the chaos is almost welcome. Anything is better than the void, the absence.

In the summer of 2005, my father was dying of cancer on the West Bank of New Orleans. The doctors only gave him a few more months. Like most summers, hurricanes in the Gulf are ordinary, happening in the peripheral of our lives. They come close, you take the necessary precautions, but they always go some place else; however, that isn’t the way it happened this particular August. The decision to evacuate was a hard one for my stepmother and father, knowing that my father wasn’t strong enough to be moved any distance. The 12 hours drive, the long waits for gasoline and drinkable water on the way, were too much for him. My father passed from this earth two weeks later in Pensacola, never returning to his home in New Orleans. This quilt is about the void that was created by Katrina - the void of losing a parent to cancer, and the void of losing a city to a monster of a hurricane.