Bethany Torimino's art is often inspired by local folklore, and a festival that used to be held in Gastonia became the basis of a painting.
The festival, called the Fish Camp Jam, celebrated Gastonia restaurants, and it ended in the late 1990s after local interest faded.
"I'm really inspired by folklore, local stories, hyperbole," Torimino said. "I have a strong appreciation for small towns and the stories that you find there."
At the Fish Camp Jam festival, there would be catfish races that benefited civic groups.
"I was just fascinated by that concept," she said. "I live over by the (Muddy River Distillery). I took a kayak out one day with my painting stuff over by the bridge that's by the distillery and painted two giant catfish that are kind of jammed underneath that bridge."
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Originally from Montesano, a small town in Washington south of the Olympic Mountains, Torimino got her start in art early.
"I have always kind of been the artistic one in the family," she said.
She initially attended cosmetic school, and she also considered studying interior design. In college, she took painting, drawing and art history classes, eventually pivoting to study anthropology. She earned her degree in anthropology from Central Washington University, graduating in 2012.
After college, she focused on her career in UX research. Torimino moved to the southeast in 2019 when she accepted a position in Charleston. She moved to Mount Holly in 2021.
She joined Arts on the Greenway, a Mount Holly arts nonprofit and incubator space, two years ago, and she advocated for a revamping of the nonprofit's website.
"I saw so many opportunities here to modernize the digital infrastructure," she said. "There really was no digital infrastructure. That's been a lot of my work over the past year."
Now, she hopes to eventually go back to graduate school.
"A lot of the work that I've done here with building out the digital infrastructure has been kind of an important portfolio piece in that process of preparing for that application," she said.
Artistically, she wants to work toward a vision of using the arts to serve neurodiverse children.
"Kids who are maybe more like neurodiverse. I'm really inspired … by a lot of the literature coming out that is celebrating and bringing awareness to kids with neurodiverse needs and abilities," she said. "It's wonderful and inspiring."
"As a UX researcher in the art field, there's design for people with ADA needs, and there's a lot of opportunity in that field to be more creative and innovative," she added. "I could see that coming together with a youth arts program that kind of brings it all together in some way. What that looks like or it's called, I'm not sure yet. I'm kind of in this discovery phase."