Driftwood Horse at Biloxi Visitor Center

Marlin Miller gave south Mississippi a trail of carvings he created, from trees Hurricane Katrina had killed. Now, for the 10th anniversary of the storm he’s spending a week on the Coast restoring the art so the eagles, egrets and dolphins will last years longer.
“Eventually, nature will reclaim some of the sculptures,” he said. But his family and a large crew of volunteers will postpone that demise during the second week in June when they shore up the carvings.
His son Preston, who on many weekends made the three-hour trek from their Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, home to help with the carvings, will be coming in from Florida State University. His wife, Rene, who coordinated her husband’s artistic efforts across south Mississippi, will repaint the towering sculpture at the Biloxi Town Green.
“We’re going to spend a week, and we’re going to start at the end and go through all the sculptures in Biloxi,” Miller said.
They will freshly grind the carvings and clean up the bases.
“The ones inside the sculpture garden are in very poor repair,” he said. Those may have to get a masonry insert in the base of the sculptures to displace the wood the bugs like to eat.
A termite company will need to treat the carvings, and he said a city worker in a boom truck will shoot a fresh coat of varnish over the sculptures when the restoration work is complete.
The motivation behind the more than three dozen sculptures he carved for free across the three Coast counties “was all about the spirit of the rebuild and the power and the energy it took,” he said. “All the focus was on that, because nobody wanted to stop and look back. Now, 10 years later, I decided I was going to go back and explore some of the emotion.”
It is important to return and capture the other side of Katrina, Miller said. “To show the pain and the suffering. It was the worst that Mother Nature could have dished out.”
Miller repeatedly saw the toll in the people he met as he worked on the Katrina carvings. Biloxi had paid artist Dayton Scoggins $7,000 to carve five trees when Miller volunteered to do some as a gift to Biloxi in 2007, two years after Katrina.
“I was just going to do a couple sculptures,” he said.
Quickly the project became bigger.
His sculpture trail now stretches from the visitors’ centers at each state line in Mississippi to Keesler Air Force Base, where Miller once was stationed, to Infinity Science Center and well beyond. One of his carvings stands in the yard of a hospice in New Orleans. Another is in a tree that died outside the Old Courthouse in Fort Myers, Florida, and he recently completed a carving at the Destin Harbor Walk in Florida. He turns away more requests than he can ever complete.
What is significant about his Katrina carvings project is what it represents. “It made me better, my family better,” he said, but ultimately he said it’s not about him — or Katrina. “It’s really is about the people of south Mississippi.”

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