In the 2014 Davidson College Exhibition Catalogue for "State of Emergency", curator Lia Newman writes,

"Kate Kretz is plagued with nightmares featuring weather imagery, specifically, several tornadoes hovering on the horizon. As such, images “of doom, catastrophes waiting to strike” play a prominent role in many of the artist’s works, including drawings, encaustic paintings, and embroideries made with human hair.

To create Tempest IV and Tempest V, Kretz etched small silverpoint drawings of the dream-inspired tornadoes into the bowls of antique spoons. Images of tornadoes, inscribed onto domestic objects, are not about a specific storm or natural disaster—or even about weather at all. Rather, for Kretz, the fury of nature has become emblematic of the unpredictability, devastation, and anxiety associated with dysfunctional family relationships. Kretz notes, “The self-destructive, cleansing cycles of nature echo the self-destructive, and (if we are lucky), sometimes transformative cycles of individuals."

Silverpoint is an ancient medium. Marks are made on a prepared surface with solid silver wire. You cannot erase, and the darker values can only be achieved by working over the surface repeatedly. The silver marks take on a warm patina when it tarnishes. While most artists work on flat panels, I choose found silver objects as the grounds for my work.

Emotion is internal weather. Growing up in a highly dysfunctional family, tornadoes in my dreams have always felt like signals of impending doom, hovering on the horizon, a reminder to brace one’s self against the next disaster. Floods in ladles are wells of overwhelming sorrow and loss.

"Après moi, le déluge" - King Louis XVI

In late 2019, I took up this series again to create work that addresses global warming, rising sea levels, and the climate crisis. This new suite envisions iconic cities of the world, flooded. In some cases, this reality has already come to pass… in others, I am foreshadowing the seemingly inevitable catastrophe. Those who suffer the most dire consequences of these events caused by man’s folly and greed are seldom those born with silver spoons in their mouths.