How does a visual artist respond when the worst happens? For St. Petersburg, Florida’s Mel Kadel, the answer was: start almost from scratch, mid-career, after September’s strike on the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Helene, the first of two massive tropical storms to hit the region within two weeks.
“I didn’t take any work with me,” Kadel, the PureHoney artist for December 2024, wrote in an exchange of emails looking back on how she’s coped with hurricane season. “The mental state during an evacuation is filled with so much stress and confusion. It’s a sudden mix of doom and wishful thinking. Will this storm really be that bad? What direction should I drive? Will the location I choose be safer, or will it change paths?”
“But, in the back of your mind,” she added, “you’re not thinking the worst.”
Pennsylvania native Kadel moved to Florida from Los Angeles in 2020. “I’ve spent time in St. Pete since I was young and have family here, so it’s a home away from home,” she wrote. “After 23 years in LA, this was the first place I thought about moving. Familiar, beautiful, and completely different.”
Ways for Days
With Category 4 Helene spiraling toward the Gulf Coast and the picturesque but flood-prone barrier island where Kadel lives, she packed up belongings and supplies in her car, but left her artwork. “I grabbed a few plastic bins of recent work and put them on top of my desk (in the off chance I got a ‘little bit of water’ in my house),” she wrote. “A fraction of my work. That last-minute decision saved the only pieces I could fully recover from the damage.”
Between Helene and then Hurricane Milton making landfall back to back, Kadel has understandably had more than just artwork to attend to. “I keep feeling derailed from focus,” she wrote, “But, I’ve also had a lot of incredible experiences over the last few weeks with family and neighbors. The bond feels tighter than ever, but a lot of people are questioning their futures here, me included.”
Kadel has strong bonds across multiple subcultures, two major ones being punk music and skateboarding. She recently designed a series of “big fish” decks for Tony Alva, the pro skateboarder who pioneered vertical skating in the 1970s. “That was one of the rare moments I wrote to all my old skater friends and was like, ‘Look, I did a deck for Alva!’” she wrote. “My teenager self was so proud to tell them, because skating was such a huge part of everything. I had worked with some other skate companies in LA, like Vans, Volcom, and Foundation but the Tony Alva deck was a highlight for me.”
Supporting your community is almost second nature when you’re active in a scene. So what does someone who’s just been through a hurricane recommend other artists do? “Design your space for year-round, not just hurricane season,” Kadel wrote. “That way you’re not stuck having to prep in the last-minute of an evacuation. Store work, archives, and materials on higher shelves. Try to minimize that panic of saving work in a chaotic moment.”
For the near term, she is encouraging people to keep affected Gulf Coast artists in mind and help where they can. “Like other businesses and workers, artists have also lost their inventory, materials, housing, ability to run online stores, and so on,” she wrote. “It’ll take time for them to reengage and get back into a working flow. When they do come back around, try to buy a little something from them or just let them know it’s good to see them back.”
Kadel looks at her surroundings and circumstances a little differently now. “It’s a beautiful area, and I picture this town being part of my life forever,” she wrote. “But the storms and recovery occupy so much time, stress, and overall distraction.”
“Losing so much at once is an abstract experience, and I’m getting a crash course on letting go of control (of everything) in a weird way,” Kadel wrote, “The emotional value I’ve assigned to so much had to change suddenly. Right now, I have to be exactly in the moment. It’s the most inspiring place to be.”
Find the artist online at melkadel.com and instagram.com/melkadel ~ Kelli Bodle
