Sculpting Stories
Betsy Towns Blends Narrative and Art

Photo by Rich Fowler

When Betsy Towns goes to the dentist, she often takes the dentist’s old, discarded tools back home with her.

They work perfectly, Towns said, as utensils for the hand-carved brick artwork, which has gained her a following in North Carolina while she simultaneously completes her doctoral degree in art history at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The Charlotte native studies with the help of a Pogue Fellowship from the Graduate School. Her undergraduate degrees in English and studio art, followed by eight years of teaching high school or working as an artist, have led her to an interdisciplinary field of research that combines two loves.

Towns’ research focuses on 19th-century ornithologists Edward Lear and Thomas Bewick, who both wrote children’s alphabet books. As many artists before them, they were able to combine stories of children and birds in the same works. She is examining the two men’s works and a study of childhood and birds.

When she was an undergraduate and Morehead Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill (finishing in 1991), an English professor told Towns she writes like an art historian. His words proved useful, as Towns finds that art history is a middle ground between her loves for literature and studio art. The discipline requires both careful writing and contact with artwork. “The two seem connected to me,” she said.

Moreover, “a lot of my artwork is about story — conveying narrative in different ways,” she said. “And my interest in English is always a very creative interest.”

Towns hopes to continue producing art works like those she now has on display in Charlotte and at the private homes of a number of local residents.

In Charlotte, she carved and sculpted a six-panel wall mural for the Independence Regional Public Library depicting North Carolina landscapes. She is completing another large wall mural for the Irwin Creek Recreation Center in Charlotte focusing on the city’s rapidly disappearing streams and waterways.

She also has done works for the Charlotte Arts Commission and North Carolina Zoological Park. Both works are in carved, glazed brick — a sculptural form that Towns says goes back thousands of years but is rarely done today.

Towns gets the raw unfired bricks for her sculptures at a brick factory in Sanford, N.C. Since the bricks need to be handled carefully, dental tools work nicely — although traditional pottery tools, old spoons, grinders, sanders and kitchen implements have also worked.

Towns does the work in one of two studios near the Quonset hut-style home that she and her husband designed and built themselves in rural Efland, between Hillsborough and Mebane in Orange County. Husband Mark Robinson is completing his master’s degree in communication studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, specializing in multimedia design.

When the couple began looking for a place for their graduate studies, they initially looked afar. Then they realized that their alma mater, Carolina, offered everything the pair needed close to home.

“I had a really good experience at UNC as an undergraduate,” Towns said, “so it made good sense to come back here, both scholastically and financially.”

-Cindy Elmore

© 2002, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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