By Taylor McDaniel

At the opening of the Student Invitational Art Exhibition, Bethany Morrison descends the spiral staircase into the crowded art gallery. As she reaches the bottom, a woman approaches her and  Bethany flushes red and smiles as she shakes the woman’s hand. She leaves the woman behind, weaving her way through the crowd and deeper into the gallery.

The Student Invitational Art Exhibition is the highlight of the year for Belhaven’s Fine Arts Department. Bethany, a junior Fine Arts major, has five pieces in the exhibition. Near the center of the gallery, one can spot her biggest piece: Scavenger’s Nest. The sculpture stretches from the floor nearly to the ceiling and makes use of everything from broken tree branches to a worn old pocket watch. It is a highlight of the exhibition and a piece that embodies the themes that Bethany has worked into her works since she discovered art as a child. Bethany comes to a stop near the sculpture and stands beside it, occasionally answering questions from intrigued visitors.

When asked about how she first fell in love with art, she recounts the memory with a soft smile. “I was probably five or six. For some reason, I had a bowl on my head,” she says, laughing. “My dad drew me. Seeing that drawing was the first time I had that [sense] of wonder, that [one] can represent reality with just a paper and a pencil.” From that point on, she practiced her own drawing skills, usually as a way to work through difficult times in her life.

Even after realization, Bethany never believed that her art could be anything other than a hobby, a way to work out her emotions when words failed. It wasn’t until she came to Belhaven University in the fall of 2016 that she realized she might be wrong. To fulfill one of her general elective requirements, she decided to take a drawing class. “Taking that class showed me that this could be a mature, thoughtful, important process,” she says to me. The following semester, she switched majors from Creative Writing to Fine Arts—though she kept the former as her minor—and has never looked back.

It might come as a surprise to some that her favorite work on display in the exhibition isn’t the massive sculpture she spent hours meticulously putting together in the heart of the art gallery. Instead, the honor falls to a piece one might easily overlook: a picture in a small, framed case tucked away near the entrance to the gallery. “It was an ink drawing that I had done titled Amelioration.”

The word, which finds its roots in Old French, means to make better or repair. That idea is a theme which runs throughout all her works, as her roommate, Madeline Ross, explains to me after the show. “She takes something broken and she makes it into something whole.” Bethany’s artwork often incorporates what others might consider broken or useless—a piece of twisted, rusted metal from a hubcap, or a tangled ball of thrown-away twine. She makes these pieces of refuse the focal points of her displays, a way to show the world that what it considers broken can be beautiful.

It’s a sentiment in her work that bleeds over from her life outside of art, in particular how she interacts with other people as her roommate attests. The two first met as the only fantasy writers in Belhaven’s Creative Writing department and bonded over that fact. Eventually, Bethany found other young fantasy writers and helped form the department’s first series of fantasy colloquies—meetings where writers can share their latest stories and receive feedback. Just as she does in her art, “Bethany reaches out to outcasts and tries to integrate them into society.”

The full Amelioration Collection, four parts in total, is on display alongside her Scavenger’s Nest at the Bitsy Irby Art Gallery on the campus of Belhaven University. Her artwork, part of the Student Invitational Art Exhibition, will be available for viewing until May 10. The event is free and open to the public between the hours of 10 A.M. and 6 P.M. Monday through Friday. Check out her artwork for yourself and let us know what you think of it in the comment section down below.