I was never much into photography before Katrina. Instead, I enjoyed experimenting with color and texture—working with paint on canvas, art-to-wear jewelry, wooden totem poles, and found objects. In 1993, I moved from New Orleans to the Netherlands where I was influenced by the COBRA movement that had been popular in the Benelux and Scandinavia in the ‘50s and promoted the total freedom of color and form. This all changed on August 29th 2005 when the levees broke and my hometown was flooded for weeks.

I had been on vacation with my husband and children in New Orleans when Katrina took aim. After evacuating with my parents and grandmother, I went back to New Orleans at least six times to help out my family in the year after the storm. While I was there I started to document the storm’s wrath, as a way of making sense of all the horror around me and in some way, to distance myself from it. However, after spending eighteen months documenting the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it was time to put my energy into something uplifting and so the flower reflections series was born.

New Orleans is a city, which is full of color, music, art and exuberance for life—indeed joie de vivre. Yet that side of New Orleans, the city of my youth, was markedly gone after Katrina. When we reached the anniversary of Katrina it felt as if there was not the political will needed to rebuild New Orleans. I worried that the city would never be the same. Finding inspiration in the vibrant colors of exotic flowers and their reflections in water, I began this work as a way to bring back the joie de vivre that New Orleans stands for.

The way in which I photographed the work in this series, gives it a painterly and abstract quality. All of it has been photographed outside in order to show the link with nature, in particularly, that as much as we’d like to try, man cannot always control nature.