CELEBRATING CREATIVITY AT POCOSIN ARTS

by Julie Ann Powers

Reprinted from Coastwatch, a bimonthly magazine of North Carolina Sea Grant. For more information, write Coastwatch, NCSU Box 8605, Raleigh, NC 27695-8605, or check the Sea Grant website: http://www.ncsu.edu/seagrant

Pocosin Arts spreads out in a hushed riot of color and texture on the second floor of an old brick building on Main Street in Columbia.

On the first floor below, washers whir and dryers hum in the local Laundromat.

The proximity to practicality is coincidental for the arts organization, but it nevertheless reinforces a message: Creativity is integral, and essential, to daily life. Pocosin Arts celebrates the particular creativity that arises from everyday existence in the surrounding woods and wetlands.

The nonprofit center's mission is "connecting," explains executive director Feather Phillips, who founded Pocosin Arts four years ago.

The center took its name from the pocosin wetlands that dominate the landscape. "Pocosin" is an Algonquin word meaning "swamp on a hill." Bound by the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds, the region is one of awesome, untamed beauty. The human population, however, has a history of struggle with the elements and the isolation.

Pocosin Arts spotlights the resourcefulness of residents and the links between their lives and their surroundings. In an "education gallery," raw clay is situated next to exquisite potter. Broom sedge bristles beside intricate Somerset baskets, replicas of those crafted by the enslaved population at the former rice plantation down the road.

"This gallery is to teach about the people, who they are, where they come from; to teach about the materials this environment produces and the cultural traditions, how they wrap around and are manifested in these materials," Phillips says.

She grasps a twisted tree branch in one hand; in the other, she clutches an African walking stick, cut from similarly formed wood and topped with a delicately carved face.

"This is connecting culture to environment through art," she says.

Other displays reflect conservation habits that predate today's trends. Among the muted tones of an antique quilt, the words "100 Percent Pure Cane" reveal the patchwork was made from sugar sacks.

"One of the themes that runs through the collection is saving and piecing and recycling," Phillips says. "That's a cultural tradition here. Because of the poverty and the isolation, the people here didn't waste."

Pocosin Arts is no museum, however. The airy expanse beyond the gallery, where tall windows overlook the Scuppernong River, is a busy work space for artists and the setting for the center's many workshops. A gift shop beckons near the entrance. A potting studio unfolds along one wall. Spinning wheels, looms and bags of fleece - some from Phillips' own goats line another. Everywhere, intriguing shapes and hues invite investigation.

Retired farmer and forester Roy Smith gathers a heap of dried reeds from a table to make a "yard broom." Outside, he binds them with red calico, then slaps the leafy end on the walkway until only spikes remain. he remembers helping his mother make a broom like this to tidy the packed dirt yard of his childhood. He has captured the memory in bright paints on a wood block.

"Back then, a lot of people didn't have lawns," he says. "Most people had a lot of stock in the yard. Chickens and geese kept the grass down."

Placing such familiar items as yard brooms and quilts among finer arts is one reason Pocosin Arts is welcomed in a community that would seem to have little capacity for anything but survival. When the center opened, some local residents were surprised - and delighted - by the sudden attention to skills taken for granted and perhaps considered a mark of poverty.

"All I did was hold a mirror up and say, 'Look at yourself. Look how wonderful you are,"' Phillips says. "Our whole emphasis is not to force an aesthetic on this community or anybody else who comes here, but just to celebrate what's here and to encourage continuous creativity."

Fiber arts, pottery and folk arts are most visible at the center. But other forms - papermaking, wood carving, even welding - are honored.

Near the door, a lavender chair made of welded fuel tanks silently signals that Pocosin Arts is for everyone. The center deliberately bought the whimsical chair to disarm any reluctance in its visitors toward art and artists.

"Anybody can identify with that chair," Phillips says, "especially local men who save scrap metal and weld. They saw immediately what that chair was made of, and they appreciated the humor and the skill."

Phillips hurries from one item to the next, eager to showcase the talents of the artists and the center's activities. A flowing sapphire dress sets off her silver hair and testifies to her own artistic flair. Feather seems a particularly fitting name, though she explains it is not an invention of her profession. Her first name is Kathryn, but she has been called Feather, short for her middle name of Featherstone, since childhood.

Pocosin Arts is the result of a confluence of several events in Phillips' life and the region she calls home. Before opening the center, Phillips taught art for seven years in nearby Creswell. The prevailing attitude among children reflected the area's economic situation.

"There wasn't a lot of confidence about where they lived, about who they were," she says.

Phillips, on the other hand, was enchanted by her surroundings and her neighbors. She left a public television career in Boston to live on Martha's Vineyard, then sailed south in 1972.

The boat docked in Wilmington, where she later married waterman Willy Phillips. The settled in Bath and had a son, Jake, now 14. But Willy Phillips couldn't make a living crabbing in the deteriorating waters in the Pamlico River. Attracted by the Alligator River and its still-productive waters, the family moved to Tyrrell County in 1987.

As the new art teacher in Creswell, Feather Phillips had an outsider's appreciation for the area and latitude in lesson planning. "So I decided to develop a curriculum that was based on this place and these people," she says.

In recent years, a regional effort to promote nature-based tourism began gaining momentum. Phillips wanted to make art a part of it.

"I felt that this fit," she say. "I was working with the children, and we were always gathering our own grasses and digging our own clay, or finding other materials to make art from the environment, and thereby having a better appreciation for the relationships, the connections. And I thought, well, maybe this would work for grown-ups too."

An environmental activist all her adult life, Phillips says Pocosin Arts is a change in tactics. She recounts displaying diseased fish at water quality hearings in recent times, protesting nuclear power in earlier years.

"We always were ranting against something," she says. "Instead of reacting against something, I decided to put forth a positive agenda that had the same goal. I felt that if this education program would encourage visitors and students and the community to appreciate the pocosin environment, to appreciate the human community, the whole package, then perhaps it would be less threatened. It would be just a little harder to say, 'Just fill it or dredge it.'"

The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation granted $25,000 in the fall of 1994 to launch Pocosin Arts. After a flurry of work and renovation of its current quarters, Pocosin Arts premiered in October 1995.

Governed by a board of directors, it has flourished under other Reynolds money, grants from the Kathleen Price Bryan Family Fund, other organizations and the state, plus individual and business contributions. Its calendar is full or workshops and seminars. Remembering her own overextended teaching days, Phillips makes Pocosin Arts especially available to teachers.

The center features a pottery program taught by Carol Lee, who experiments with local clays. Lee shared the dreams and plans for the center with Phillips before the founding. She now shares a devotion to it.

"I never want to leave," Lee says."

An underlying philosophy of Pocosin Arts is that art could, at least in part, salve some of the region's woes. Nurturing creativity fosters success, Phillips says.

"It isn't just a pot or a carving or a painting or a weaving," she says. "It's 'I did it. I can do it again. Or maybe I can do something else.'"

Art, she says, also can bring diverse groups and cultures together.

"People can communicate through art who might not be able to otherwise," she says. "Different cultures can communicate. I saw it with children."

And she believes the capacity to create is universal, a common thread connecting all. "It's part of the human package, creativity," she says.

Her own creation, Pocosin Arts, has reached far beyond her personal dreams for it. "It belongs to other people now," she says.

Pocosin Arts is raising funds to buy the building it share with the laundry, and another one next door, so it can expand. Meanwhile, Phillips is dreaming new dreams for connecting culture to the environment through art.

"It's limitless," she says, "how this creative setting can be used."