Lawson Works - Floodline - Art by John Lawson

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


		I wanted to create a personal testament relating to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, without the theatrics of mass media, which I often feel only demeans the art work. Finding a way to preserve the rapidly deteriorating photographs became a priority.

		I started mounting the photographs onto 4 foot long substrate sections, before encasing them in a layer of hot wax. The wax not only preserved the remains of the washed out images, but gave the individual photographs the sense of being "apart" from the present, almost as if they were suspended in time.

		I then laid a curtain of recycled Mardi Gras beads, also in the flood, over the photographs, creating a sense of intimacy and resembling a Flood Line of water, found on thousands of homes effected by this disaster. To date, I have made 70 feet of Flood Line, 25ft is now permanently installed at the Union Lofts in New Orleans. jkl April 2007