By Chris Moore

chris.moore@panews.com

The Museum of the Gulf Coast is hosting “Submerged,” an exhibit by Amy Morris, who was inspired by the effects of Tropical Storm Harvey.

“I think everyone was just finding a way to cope,” Morris said. “This was my way.”

Morris said that she began to create the pieces after seeing the devastation and subsequent cleanup.

“We lived in a area near Bevil Oaks and Northwest Forrest,” she said. “We were trapped in our neighborhood. We didn’t get water in our house but not even half a mile down the road, people had 3 feet of water in their house. Just watching everyone dealing with the events and seeing everyone cleaning out their home and seeing all of their stuff sitting on the sidewalk, seeing dump trucks go up and down the road — it just made me really feel like I could help connect with my community and help them connect with the losses and different things that happened.”

“Submerged” contains various pieces and styles of art.

“It is all encaustic wax, which is bees wax and damar resin,” Morris said. “Embedded in a lot of that is debris. There are toys, pieces of books and doorknobs. You can see that in a lot of them. There are photographs and damaged negatives that I took and redeveloped and blew them up so I could make them fit on my panels.”

The title piece was the first one Morris finished.

“The blue one with the circle represents the hurricane itself,” she said. “We looked at all of those hurricane maps on the news with the big white circle over us for five days. If you get closer to it, you can see little cut out words from brochures from the tourist center in Beaumont. The words have to do with all of the people who were submerged by the water. It talks about the different towns and the locations and the different type of people that live here.”

The idea for the second piece she made came after she saw a Bible in a debris pile.

“The whole cover was just covered in mold,” Morris said. “I knew I couldn’t take that with me so I tore out all of the beginning pages and the pages with maps in the back. I put them all across the surface and recreated the mold with the encaustic wax. I was looking up a verse or something that I could use for the title. In Leviticus, it talks about how mold is defiling. Every time it talks about mold its mentions that it is a defiling thing. So that’s why I used the title ‘Defiling’, for that one.”

The final two pieces Morris created are called “Revival” and “Restoration.”

“Some of the other pieces are kind of sad,” she said. “I wanted something that talked about the restoration and the rebuilding on a cellular level. We’re all trying to regrow and rebuild.”

The exhibit closes June 9.

 

“Submerged” is being shown at the Museum of the Gulf Coast, 700 Procter St., Port Arthur. 409-982-7000. Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.