Focused on how nature and creativity merge as reflections of individual and collective purpose, the recent Spotfin Art & Nature Gathering — named for the Spotfin Chub, a freshwater minnow native to Western North Carolina — was held Sept. 25-26 at the Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center in Franklin.
Eventgoers could try printmaking, collaging, writing, weaving, and journaling through the lens of the natural world, along with artist vendor tables, exhibits, speakers, presentations, watercolor botanical studies, a bird walk, and an Alarka Expeditions-led cultural and natural history boat tour of the Little Tennessee River.
Participant Amy Fitzgerald explained how Spotfin’s programming intentionally cultivated a sense of presence and togetherness.
“I think, particularly in this community, we are looking to protect and conserve what we have around us because it’s such a treasure. And being able to bring it back in and do different art forms and different approaches, which is what they offered through Spotfin,” she said. “People had a lot of different options, and they could bring their relationship to nature in the right form that meant the most to them.”
Textured, Spotfin-printed cutouts were tacked to a corkboard in the school’s auditorium, where we gathered for the keynote address, each displaying a participant’s written answer to a corresponding question: “In what ways do you pay intimate attention?”
“I feel connected to place when I consciously slow my pace, listen intentionally to the sounds of nature around me,” one answer read.
“Eyes scan, receiving presence. Heart beats, giving presence. I am curious. I am here. I am listening,” read another.
Speaker Zelda Lockhart — a Fulbright Specialist, cross-cultural storyteller, award-winning novelist, and former Piedmont poet laureate — began the keynote by questioning the foundation of humanity’s relationships. She explained that connections to nature, oneself, each other, the community, and the world are shaped within the abusive structure of capitalism and colonialism. To encourage audience members to think beyond societal limitations, she asked a simple question — “What did you come here to do?” — with one large parameter.
Lockhart said the answer could not include anything tied to making money, inviting the room to imagine what they’d center if finances weren’t a constraint — or even a factor.
“Learn, connect, be in wonder, and be in awe,” one audience member said.
Lockhart asked attendees to consider a specific action they’d take toward fulfilling their purpose. She then posed the third and final question: Where, in a place that breaks an internalized limitation, will you take this action?
“It cannot be a save-the-whales moment. What I mean by that is, you cannot, with your colonial brain, say, ‘I believe in the superiority and the inferiority lie that has been put in place based on colonialism, capitalism, imperialism. I believe in it so deeply that I believe that someone is lesser than me, and I am going to go, and I am going to help them when they didn’t ask for it,’” she explained, urging attendees to start with the pain and trauma that’s torn through familial relationships when choosing a place.
A Spotfin participant shared his responses, along with the practical constraints he was grappling with. To ensure his family’s inheritance goes to conservation or another world-serving initiative, he said he’s committed to sharing his worldview with relatives still living inside a colonial narrative. But he admitted there was a caveat to how he’d approach them and to the content itself.
“I (will) broach that only tentatively and slowly because I don’t want to undermine relationships,” he said, adding that his success hinges on not alienating those he wants to address.
Lockhart said his focus on strategy and approach reflected what humans prioritize amid unnatural external factors. To illustrate that point, she offered an analogy: An apple seed doesn’t refuse to sprout because it fears a human might fail to water it. An apple seed doesn’t consider these things. It sprouts regardless. She then spoke to the situation more directly.
“You’re starving your reality of that thing that you feel compelled to do, because you’re … concentrating on the abusers, what they may and may not give you,” she said.
“The totality of all the abuse in society is so pervasive that we’re all frozen,” someone commented from the audience. “We don’t even know how to think what you’re talking about because we’re all just immediately already thinking about the next thing that we got to do.”
Lockhart’s own journey of boundary-breaking showed that answering these questions is not always futile. She recounted a past reluctance to travel to Mississippi: family members living there didn’t believe her father had molested her. But recently, she returned, intent on breaking intergenerational curses.
She met one person in Mississippi who introduced her to another who invited her to speak at Spotfin, she said, musing about life’s unexpected moments.
“Because of that (encounter), I’ve made some beautiful connections today,” Lockhart explained.