This essay considers the work of Atlanta-based artist Katherine Taylor, which returns repeatedly to the devastating hurricanes that have afflicted her hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. Pointing to Taylor's use of news footage, private photographs and personal memories to come to terms with Hurricane Camille, which devastated her family home when she was a child, the essay highlights the role of recording, remembering and working through in her work. The essay compares earlier paintings by Taylor, which create a sense of stasis in the wake of catastrophe, with recent works that seem to have given up the fight against water and weather. With their smeared and streaked paint, these works convey a terrain vague so encroached upon by the elements that the viewer is unclear what she sees. The emptiness and destruction depicted in these stripped-down works becomes an analogy for the end of painting as much as a preoccupation with civilization’s disappearance
