For Immediate Release
Contact:
Suzanne Watson
Executive Director, Meetinghouse Arts, 4o Main St. Freeport, ME 04032
207.712.3016 | director@meetinghousearts.org
MeetinghouseArts.org 

From Waste to Wonder: Reclaimed Art & Design Inspires in Freeport

This October, Meetinghouse Arts opens From Waste to Wonder: Reclaimed Art & Design, an exhibition that asks a simple but urgent question: what becomes of the things we cast aside? 

Opening with a 5–7 p.m. reception on Thursday, Oct. 23, and running through Nov 2nd, the show gathers three nationally and internationally recognized Maine artists who transform discards into works that are luminous, playful, thought provoking, and deeply human.

The Meetinghouse Arts Gallery exhibition brings together Freeport resident & artist/designer Mandana MacPherson, environmental artist Pamela “Posey” Moulton, and sculptor Ian Trask. Each approaches reuse with a playful and creative spirit, turning discarded materials into imaginative forms that invite curiosity and delight. 

Earlier in October, the  conversation extends to Sidle House Gallery,20 Bartol Island Road, Freeport, where Recollected & Reconfigured Runway will take place at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 17. This exclusive fashion show features MacPherson’s work and adds artist Crystal Cawley, whose artworks made from repurposed materials highlight both traditional skills and material intelligence. Tickets for the fashion show are $25 in advance and $35 at the door. Only 50 seats are available. Tickets here.  Both events are made possible in part due to the support of Gingham in Freeport. 

“We are proud to welcome such respected voices in art and sustainability," said Suzanne Watson, executive director of Meetinghouse Arts. “Having worked in environmental policy for many years, I’ve seen how often the conversation is framed by limits. These artists turn that conversation on its head, showing us that sustainability can be about imagination, joy, and possibility. We’re also proud to collaborate with our partners at Sidle House Gallery to bring this exhibition out to the community.”

MacPherson has long been drawn to materials others overlook. In her hands, black rubber inner tubes are cut, laced, and woven into sculptural forms that pulse with pattern and strength. “My artwork strives to communicate dichotomies in the allure and danger of these materials,” MacPherson said, “and to present both the beauty and the consequence associated with them.”  

Moulton, known as Posey, designed the Pinkies sculptures that have stood in Freeport’s downtown for the past year. Her installations begin with materials society might discard, reshaped into vibrant environments where children and adults alike are encouraged to play, interact and touch the work. Many of the materials she uses have been donated by local fishermen and community members, embedding each work with both memory and renewal.

Trask, a Bowdoin College graduate with a background in biology, approaches discarded materials with the curiosity of both a scientist and an artist. Whether arranging everyday objects into intricate patterns or crafting small works with puckish humor, his sculptures carry a mischievous invitation. 

Cawley combines the history of clothing with the possibilities of paper and fabric sculpture, reworking textiles through embroidery, spinning, and letterpress printing to create unexpected forms.

From Waste to Wonder also serves as a celebration of the Pinkies, the towering sculptures that have enlivened downtown Freeport since last fall. Designed by Posey and built from donated fishing nets and other materials, the Pinkies have stood as playful ambassadors for the power of reuse. 

Together, these exhibitions show how art gives discarded materials new life. Sustainability is not only about what we preserve, but also about how we reimagine. Through playfulness and reinvention, artists turn what is often overlooked into catalysts for beauty, conversation, and change.  

Mandana MacPherson’s work in the Meetinghouse Arts Gallery exhibit and the Sidle House Gallery fashion show was funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Mandana MacPherson is a mixed media artist and designer who has focused extensively on reclaimed rubber, reflecting her preoccupation with things left behind. Mandana pioneered the reuse of waste inner tubes through her handbag and wallet company Used Rubber USA. Coverage in over 200 fashion, environmental and business magazines, from National Geographic to French Vogue, along with work shown at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, London’s Museum of Science, Oakland Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Folk Art, and other venues worldwide, piqued the public’s interest, established waste tubes as a viable resource, and spawned countless other recycled rubber small businesses and artworks internationally. Since the 1980s, she has had a first hand view of the evolving and often failed methodology for dealing with waste transportation rubber. Her artwork strives to communicate dichotomies in the allure and danger of these materials, in concert with their beauty and utility, and in combination with a variety of other materials.

          Mandana has been on the faculty at Stanford University (where she received her MFA in design and a Robert Mondavi Fellowship) and California College of the Arts, and has taught at Haystack. She integrated the rubber materials into her teaching, created a K-12 curriculum, and engaged in civic action with her Rubber Impact Project, all with the goal of educating about the design process, new raw material concepts, and local and global sustainability. After spending 20 years living and working in San Francisco, Mandana returned to her native New England in 2006, relocating to mid coast Maine, but she retains a coast to coast perspective by returning annually to San Francisco and her Mount Shasta, California studio. She balances her time between art, design, writing and teaching, and continues to consult about issues pertinent to an ecologically sustainable future.  mandanamacpherson.com  Full CV

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Pamela “Posey”  Moulton, prolific collaborator, as both teacher and artist, Pamela Moulton tries to foster an ethos of generosity and creative exchange through making art and collaborating with multi-generational communities both near home and faraway, like Albania and India. Pamela’s installations are playful, large-scale, hands-on, and exploratory.  Moulton is a multi-disciplinary environmental artist rooted in world-building and collaboration. She recently collaborated with over 5,600 community partners, including lobstermen, neuro-divergent patients, schools, artists and many more in her TempoArts installation in Portland’s Payson Park. Her interactive spaces may be crawled through, climbed upon and occupied, allowing the public to explore its environmental consciousness in a direct, material way.

        Pamela’s recent energetic sculptures and woven environments are built from abandoned fishing equipment, known in the industry as ghost gear. Her ambiguous sculptures and installations are reminiscent of macro and microorganisms often gone unnoticed or unseen by the human eye. The accessibility and joyousness of this work lends itself to a greater consciousness about the fragility of our ecosystem and inspires better futures worth imagining.

          The sculptures and installations act as a record of time: hours spent salvaging ghost gear, tying knots, talking to fishermen, teachers, scientists, and artists. For Pamela, this work is never finished, it is born when the materials are collected and evolves continuously. The labor-intensive processes and community engagement that go into creating the work are equally important to the installation viewers arrive at. Moulton describes the collaborative process like an intuitive dance with the material, allowing participants to respond in real time. The hands that have gathered, unraveled, tied, woven, painted, touched and transformed these materials are truly inseparable from the objects. There is a rhythm to the process of making and the heartbeat of this work is the local community.

PamelaMoulton.artView Full CV

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Ian Trask is a sculptor and multimedia artist who transforms waste materials into objects and installations with new purpose and integrity. His immersive works often play with sophisticated patterns, lending unlikely materials exquisite beauty. At other times, he works on an intimate scale with puckish humor. Trask began his career in New York City  where he was a core member of the Invisible Dog Art Center and exhibited at the Spring Break Art Fair, the Figment Festival, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Upon returning to Maine, where he studied biology at Bowdoin College, Trask has exhibited at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, University of New England, University of Maine, and Cove Street Arts. In 2018, he published his first artist book, Strange Histories: A Bizarre Collaboration, and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Portland Press Herald, Maine Magazine, and Brooklyn Magazine.

        He received his degree in biological science from Bowdoin College in 2005. Following graduation he worked several years in research labs, before eventually deciding in 2007 to leave the world of science to pursue a career in visual art. After leaving his lab job Trask worked as a hospital groundskeeper cleaning up trash daily, an experience that proved to be formative in his artistic development. Ian saw the artistic potential in the waste he was confronted with everyday and quickly began working with discarded manufactured goods as the main platform for his pieces. In many of Trask’s sculptures the viewer will find a mischievous invitation. Texture and tangibility are essential to the experience of these objects, and by provoking the impulse to explore, each piece rouses in the beholder the same spirit of curiosity, experimentation and play that occasioned their creation.

Links: Artist CV | News & Press | Iantrask.com

Crystal Cawley is an artist who works with paper, textiles, collected objects, and re-purposed materials. Her work explores ideas of identity, time, memory, and loss, and draws on various traditional skills like embroidery and letterpress printing. She teaches in the Continuing and Professional Studies program at the Maine College of Art & Design in Portland, Maine, and is an artist member of Portland's Pickwick Independent Press, a printmaking collective. She has shown her work around the US and in England, Greece, and Japan. Her work is in the collections of the Boston Public Library; Columbia University Library; The Library of Congress; Maine Women Writers Collection; MOMA/Franklin Furnace Artists’ Book Collection; the Smithsonian Institution Graphic Arts Collection at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; and the Munakata Shiko Museum, Aomori, Japan, among others. She has received grants from the Maine Arts Commission, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation.   crystalcawley.com