bayou design
Kathryn Taylor Gray Before 2009, Kathryn Taylor Gray could be found signing and sorting legal documents for the law offices in Mississippi where she worked full time as a legal assistant for 34 years. When we first get on the call, Kathryn jokes that she moved away from her Louisiana roots “Way, way, way before you were born” in a genial southern accent. Transplanted to the Mississippi gulf coast in 1975 from the small, rural, farming community of Start, Louisiana, which can be found (if you know where to look) about twenty minutes east of Monroe along I-20, Kathryn, like so many of us, found her life brought to a screeching halt by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. iving in the Gulfport, MS, area at the time, Kathryn remembers, “I had no inkling I was going to stop making photography, and then I found those keys.” In the midst of the devastation she found herself wandering about the ruins of our collective history and stumbled upon some rusty old keys when inspiration struck. “I thought these would make some cool jewelry. There was so much chaos here and so much stuff everywhere that it helped me to make some kind of sense out of it, if I could create something out of the junk,” Kathryn tells me. She cites local artist Lori Gordon, who was based out of Bay St. Louis, MS, in 2006 as a source of inspiration for her. After Katrina, Gordon made several mixed media installations using larger debris from the hurricane in the work she is most widely known for, “The Katrina Collection.” “I wanted to do something like that on a small scale,” Kathryn explains.
L
L AUR A CASON
K E L LY M O O R E C L A R K
