Every day after Hurricane Katrina decimated her studio and ripped her home off its foundation, Bay St. Louis artist Lori Gordon picked her way through piles of debris to the slab where her house once stood. All that remained of her work on the Gulf Coast was embedded there in the cement, a mosaic tile floor she’d laid herself. So in a daily ritual that bordered on the obsessive, Gordon would sweep the floor clean of every speck of dirt and trash that had blown onto it overnight. “It was the cleanest that floor had ever been,” she says with a laugh. “There’s something weird psychologically that happens when you lose everything—what you have left is very important.”
