Asheville artist documents her Hurricane Helene experience
Art of recovery: Asheville artist documents her Hurricane Helene experience
“Every time it rains, everyone is nervous who has experienced this,” Gullow told Queen City News. “There’s a lot of anxiety still.”
Saturday, September 27, marks one year since Hurricane Helene ravaged Western North Carolina.
Hurricane Helene
A series of paintings gives Gullow stark reminders of how she felt during the region’s darkest days.
“11:40 a.m.,” she says, putting a time stamp on a piece while we did this story.
We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but Ursula can usually count on a daily ritual. She has either painted or drawn herself almost every day for 13 years.
“It has just become a thing I do without even thinking about it,” she said.
The self-portraits are essentially her visual journal.
“I’m going to try to get you here, a little bit,” she says, starting her painting for the day, looking into her mirror with a news reporter (that would be me) looking over her shoulder.
“[The self-portraits] are a documentation of some sort of time, of events, of my creative process,” says Gullow.
More recently, the art has chronicled her hurricane experience.
“These are the portraits before Helene,” she said, turning the pages of her portfolio at her Asheville home.
“This was September 23,” she says, sifting through her self-portraits on the days Helene was on its way. “September 24, September 25.”
Two days before landfall, she sketched her face.
“It is on the stationery of a hotel where I had to stay because it was raining so bad,” she recalls. “That is why Helene was so bad, that storm saturated the ground.”
Of course, September 27 is the day disaster struck.
“This describes, sort of this like, shock,” she says, describing her self-portrait that day. “Kind of like, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how everyone else is doing.”
“Maybe I was working out some anxiety,” said Gullow, who spent a lot more time on that painting than most.
On the day after, she got a better picture of how bad things were.
“We walked around the neighborhood and just couldn’t believe all the trees were down,” she said, showing us the self-portrait from September 27.”
“Exhausted and kind of concerned,” she said, describing her face in the midst of the storm of anxiety.
“It seems like everyone was shell-shocked and didn’t even know how to proceed,” she says.
What many lost is unthinkable.
Along with self-portraits, she painted about the painful news she heard.
“A little girl watched her mother get taken by the river. And she said that her mother turned into a mermaid, and so I made these mermaids,” she said, tearing up.
“This is the way of this child processing that,” pointing to her painting on the wall of her home studio.
Since Helene, there has been a rainbow of emotions.
“I was lucky. But it’s not really a consolation to me that other people went through so much,” she says.
Not everyone here has a brush in their hand. But as folks pick up the pieces, they have a renewed portrait of the community and its unity.
“Something like this happens, we’re all in it together,” Gullow said.
Each selfie documents the ongoing self-reflection that’s very much a work in progress in the mountains.
“I wanted to show the moment,” she says, wrapping up her painting for that day. “Okay, I’m done.”
To view more of Gullow’s work, click here.
Reducing Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) remains one of the most persistent operational challenges for…
It's not every day that you need to shop for formal wear, but when it's…
A newly identified malware campaign is raising serious concerns across the cybersecurity community by delivering…
A newly identified malware campaign is raising serious concerns across the cybersecurity community by delivering…
Security researchers have uncovered a highly sophisticated attack campaign that weaponizes a legitimate, digitally signed…
Security researchers have uncovered a highly sophisticated attack campaign that weaponizes a legitimate, digitally signed…
This website uses cookies.