REPURPOSED – beginning with what remains
March 9 – April 20, 2026
Linda Shea ArtSpace Gallery, Bentley Library
Northern Essex Community College – Haverhill Campus
Artists Talk: 2-4pm, Monday, April 6, 2026
Public Reception: 5-7pm, Thursday, April 9, 2026
Curatorial Statement
This exhibition explores repurposing as both a creative practice and a way of thinking.
An invitation to look again at what has already lived a life. Working with fragments of the everyday – newsprint, metal, broken ceramics, organic materials – the artist gathers what is forgotten, allowing each object to shift, not back into what it was, but toward what it might become, extending its story rather than ending it.
Through processes of assembling, layering, and recontextualizing, familiar objects are reshaped while still carrying traces of their past. In this way, the exhibition connects to traditions of assemblage and material-based art, while remaining grounded in an accessible, process-driven approach to making.
Cracks, seams, and signs of wear are left visible as quiet records of time, touch, and use remind us that materials are not static; they hold histories and continue to evolve. By keeping these traces intact, the work highlights how meaning is not fixed, but shifts through context, attention, and care.
For students and viewers, the exhibition offers a different way of thinking about creativity. Together, these works suggest that creation does not always begin with something new, but with paying closer attention to what is already here. Repurposing becomes not only a strategy of reuse, but a practical and poetic gesture – one that values resourcefulness, sustainability, and imagination. Repurposing becomes a form of listening, honoring the quiet dignity of what has been overlooked and neglected.
What unfolds is a landscape of second lives, where transformation is neither abrupt nor complete, but continuous. We are invited to slow down, to notice what is often ignored, and to consider how transformation can emerge from what has been left behind. What was once discarded begins to breathe again – not as restoration, but as renewal, an openness to what already exists, and to the quiet potential it holds.
~ Kristin Powers, Curator
Artwork Identification Sheet
Stephen Powers
Ceramic Studio Manager – School of Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts
- 1. Mezmerized
Repurposed Ceramics
2025 - 2. Clogged Pipes
Hand-built Ceramic
2025 - 3. Ducks
Repurposed Ceramics
2024 - 4. Yearning and Turning
Repurposed and Hand-built Ceramics
2025 - 5. Two-Headed Beast
Repurposed, Cast, and Hand-built Ceramics
2024 - 6. Unicorn Dumpster
Repurposed, Cast, and Hand-built Ceramics
2024 - 7. I See Seashells
Repurposed, Cast, and Hand-built Ceramics
2024 - 8. The Candle Holder
Repurposed, Cast, and Hand-built Ceramics
2025 - 9. The Blue Woman
Cast Ceramic, Eva Zeisel Belly Button Tile
2024
Artist Statement
“My work centers on the transformation of found elements—materials that arrive in my path by chance, circumstance, or simple attention. I am drawn to objects that carry a past life or have been abandoned: fragments, remnants, overlooked ceramic pieces. These elements enter the work not through deliberate seeking, but through serendipitous encounters. I collect what the world offers.
Working in assemblage, I fuse these ceramic fragments together, allowing separate histories to meet and form a new whole. Each piece carries its own surface, break, glaze, and evidence of time. When combined and fired again, these traces remain present while becoming part of a different structure. The resulting forms are not repairs of what once existed, but entirely new objects born from convergence.
My process is guided as much by intuition as by design. I spend time with each fragment—its weight, contour, glaze, and fracture—until relationships begin to emerge. Often the pieces themselves suggest their next life, fitting together in ways that feel both accidental and inevitable.
Through this practice, I explore how meaning can be reshaped through attention and care. What was once discarded or incomplete becomes integral. The work embraces chance, transformation, and the quiet potential that exists within fragments when they are brought together and given another firing, another life.”
Chris Twichell
Illustrator & Designer – New England Journal of Medicine
- 10. Aqua Bot
Paper board, mixed media, found objects
2013 - 11. Generator Head
Acrylic, mixed media, inside light
1990 - 12. Retro Robot
Acrylic, mixed media, inside light
2018 - 13. Retro Robot #3
Acrylic, mixed media
2021
Artist Statement
Inspired by nature, Chris experiments with combining different mediums and found objects to create dimensional paintings and masks. The use of found objects is a way to convert trash items into elements of aesthetic value.
His recent pieces explore the idea of a future civilization where humans have exploited and destroyed the natural world, which has caused man’s attempt to revive and replicate those lost natural organisms with machines.
Amy Saikia Wilson
Faculty – JP Clay, Jamaica Plain
- 14. I Remember Tomorrow
Ceramic, Found Objects, Photographs, Mixed Media
2025
Artist Statement
“I had an aunt who told me on Christmas Eve at a very early age that everything I ever said or did flew to the end of the world and waited there for me, at the end of all time. During this germination early in our lives, we are imprinted with impressions that become weathervanes of taste and feeling, dependably charting directions for each of us in our lives.
When we accumulate painful experiences that were not fully faced in the moment they arose, an energetic form of emotional pain is left behind. After some years, we each have our own subconscious entity composed of our past pains and old sensations – and it will control our actions if we let it. Perhaps I am sculpting these entities into matter. More often, though, I just want to make something that reveals to me the unwrinkled face of eternity.
I know and I do not know what I am searching for. When I begin a piece, I am not sure how it will end, but it has validity because it comes into being from an inner necessity, from the desire to make clear something that can hardly be seen. I build, find, and fit together sometimes strange elements to erect an incident or entity, often involving a female protagonist. Once complete, the whole carries an aura that was not visible in its initial parts, assimilating into a process that is a continuous, ongoing discovery of self. And through the deeply personal, I may arrive at something universal.
As spiritually profound as I try to be, I still wish for my art to be sensually grounded in the things of the world and the pettiest aspects of life as a human – and as a woman specifically. Somehow having all these things be important to the same mind makes the pettiness seem profound, or at least inseparable from our lives here on Earth. The cornerstone of my work is cumulative detail. Collecting reminds me of countless ancestors of forgotten generations who join me in my making.
Everything feels uncertain and yet part of an order. I’m skipping to the part where I pause to feel the air against my skin. That very border where my inner world ends, and the rest of the world begins. Even the most repressed human has a secret life with secret thoughts and secret feelings that are lush and wild and natural. I want to forever guard the place of my untamed self.”
Ena Kantardžić
Resident Fellow at Montserrat College of Art
- 15. Untitled (shadow)
Narcissus Pseudonarcissus (Wild Daffodils), Bioplastic, Water, Muscovite Mica
2026
Artist Statement
“Untitled (shadow) is a work created from echo 2, an on-going project in the Green Mountains. Dug by hand, I planted 1000 narcissus bulbs in a trench 144ft/44m long, moving thousands of pounds/kilos of earth. Inspired by Richard Long’s 1967 sculpture Line Made by Walking, I am interested in human impact on the land, with land understood as the root of conflict. Harvesting the flowers from the installation to create new materials (inks, scents, bioplastics), the ephemerality of the project becomes suspended, neither here nor there. Untitled (shadow) is a fragmentation, a shadow of its former self, yet still looking for light–repurposing purpose.”
Anne Hopkins
Internal Communications, NECC
- 16. Mid Route Nap
Image Transfer to Boston Globe Newspapers RP
2021
Artist Statement
“I find the idea of a ‘hoarder’ or a ‘packrat’ intriguing as I myself have many precious objects, but not to an extreme. I noticed while watching the TLC show ‘Hoarders’ there is a common thread of grief among the ‘hoarders’ and their condition made more sense. I realized their grief was like an anchor, and they were stuck—held in place by this weight. Many people are able to hoist their grief up and carry on, but they aren’t – their collected objects are an expression of their grief, and their objects are a way to hold on to who they have lost. Mid Route Nap is one of my objects from the series ‘Gathered’ which explores the relationship between memory and matter.”
Kristin Powers
Professor of Art & Design – NECC, MassArt, RISD, and JP Clay
- 17. Button
Wood, Paint, Graphite, Found Buttons
2025 - 18. Plug
Wood, Paint, Graphite, Found Plug
2025 - 19. Blowing Glass
Radiator, Blown Glass
2022 - 20. Coat Hooks & Towel Rack
Gleaned Objects
2026 - 21. Remember
Glass, Newspaper
2021
Artist Statement
“I think of myself as a curator of objects and a choreographer of space, exploring an ever-evolving sculptural landscape, looking for resonant frequencies where many feel. My work embraces silence, vulnerability, and disorientation. Working with found objects and multiple media, I pair order with chaos, engineering interdependence and balance, replacing predictability with uncertainty.
I am interested in how little is required to create change – how a shift in intention, care, and subtle placement can bring the overlooked into presence. How transformation can emerge through attention rather than invention.
By contemplating the art of communication through recontextualizing familiar materials, I investigate how both objects and people can hold multiple lives at once. By arranging elements to find moments of resonance, where something clicks, even if it can’t be fully explained, I allow displaced encounters to alter identity rather than transform it.
In Repurposed, I use materials that are not remade so much as repositioned. Objects appear as they are, no longer in use but not entirely detached from it. Others remain functional, yet slightly off. These works often introduce a sense of imbalance or discomfort, disrupting expectations, and inviting viewers into a space of questioning and, sometimes, uncertainty. It’s in that in-between space – between order and chaos, control and release – that new ways of seeing and feeling can emerge.
These works exist between use and display, between function and disruption. They hold onto their past lives while opening up new ways of being seen.”
