Students awarded $3,500 in Rotary scholarships for art submissions

Seven students have won $500 scholarships from the Sandpoint Rotary for their creative works in the Bulldog Resilience Project.

The resilience project was started several months ago by the Rotary Club and counselors at the high school as a way for students to demonstrate resilience, adaptability, kindness, growth and grit.

The students, who presented their work at the Rotary meeting Wednesday, submitted works including poems, paintings and music.

Katya Kalphat-Fullford, one of the scholarship recipients, created a hand-drawn animated video of her cats, each representing an aspect highlighted in the resilience project.

“My first instinct was creatures and pets who have become a part of my life,” she said. “This was a testimony to their impact on my life.”

Most of the drawings were done over two sittings, she said.

“I saw each one of the traits listed in each of my cats. Each of them were so full of life and I believe they each had a very impactful and deep meaning to me,” Kalphat-Fullford wrote in her artist statement.

Another winner, Lucinda Meshberg, hand-sewed a shirt using four colors of recycled fabrics: red for grit, green for growth, yellow for kindness and blue for adaptability. The shirt as a whole is meant to represent living a good life.

The piece has meaning to her in two ways, she said. The first is in her choice to keep rough edges and use a thick heavy thread to stitch the shirt together.

“[The] thread shows how it isn’t perfect, but we can still pull ourselves together,” Meshberg said.

The second is a statement on the fashion industry, which she is deeply passionate about, she said.

“[The fashion industry is] such a huge polluter of the environment, and it’s super elitist and really terrible,” Meshberg said. “So I recycled each of these scraps of fabric, and it’s something I can reuse over and over again, and repurpose forever.”

Senior Hattie Larson submitted a sonnet poem, “Life Lessons,” which explores her experiences volunteering in the community.

“Sandpoint has provided so many great opportunities for my family and other families, [so] that we can grow up in such a beautiful and supportive place,” she said. “So thank you.”

In visual arts, Stephanie Sfeir submitted a painting with images of herself as a young child and herself now, incorporating butterflies, which symbolize hope, and lyrics, words of affirmation and quotes that have helped her through hard times.

Other winning submissions from students who couldn’t make it to the meeting included a poem, “It Will Be Okay,” by Kaitlynne Stewart, a painting by Alexandra David and performing art by Kaylin Otterson.

David’s painting of a tree represents grit, she wrote in her artist statement, because it overcame difficult conditions, and growth in that it was able to keep developing while other trees around it die in the same conditions. It also represents kindness, she said, as it allows flowers to grow and survive off of its own success.

“This relates to me because even when things get hard in life I don't give up,” she wrote. “I keep pushing through the challenges to achieve my goals, learning from my mistakes along the way and helping others with their challenges.”

Stewart’s poem, “It Will Be Okay,” explores a girl’s change in mindset from one filled with fear of failure to one of adaptability and growth.

“This growth will ultimately help her in the future as she no longer has to be afraid of failing because she knows that she can learn from it, and in the end it will all be okay,” Steward wrote in her artist statement.

An online showcase for the resilience project, along with artist statements, can be found on sh.lposd.org under “quick links” and “Bulldog Resilience.”