KRISTIN BETH POWERS
Dialectics
November 14 – December 20, 2026
Lightforms Art Center is pleased to present an immersive sculptural installation by Kristin Beth Powers, featuring several hundred objects that seem to grow organically from the floors and walls of the gallery. Ranging from tiny sculptures that fit in the palm of a hand to body-sized forms, the installation transforms the gallery into an environment exploring communication, vulnerability, isolation, and human connection.
“Coming into being, falling out of being, containment and openness, consuming and consumed - this wrestling match with control is what fuels my work,” Powers writes. Her practice embraces silence and disorientation, with communication and misinterpretation as central themes.
“Investigating the fragile dialectic between vulnerability and isolation, I use ceramics as a foundational anchor,” she explains. The malleability of clay, the unpredictability of firing, and the tension between its vulnerability and permanence become a material metaphor for how human communication can fracture, distort, resolve, and ultimately solidify.
Powers is fascinated by what she calls the “quiet friction of exposure,” the moment where the desire for connection clashes with the instinct to retreat and protect the self. These are moments when language fails, shifts, or collapses entirely, revealing our need for interdependence.
Throughout the gallery, hundreds of sculptural forms create unexpected relationships with one another and the surrounding architecture. Pairing order with chaos, Powers engineers balance to isolate the tension of human contact, allowing disruption and discomfort to serve as catalysts. “Every piece acts as a physical 'crossed wire,’ pulling the viewer into a liminal zone where predictability is replaced with uncertainty,” she writes.
Through this iterative practice, Powers navigates an emotional landscape where intimacy requires a blurring of boundaries that can feel like erasure. Balancing tension with softness, exposure with concealment, and strength with fragility, her work reflects unspoken relational dynamics and suggests that misinterpretation is an inevitable part of how we construct meaning.
“I am a curator of objects, a choreographer of space, a collector of sounds,” Powers writes. Working within a delicate equilibrium, she seeks “resonant frequencies where many feel.” Her practice is also a quiet reminder that “no matter what surrounds you, you must always take care of your own house.”
Powers received her BFA in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in Sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 1990, she co-founded Trikeenan Tileworks, an internationally recognized architectural ceramics company. Her work has been exhibited at the Currier Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, MassArt x SoWa, and other venues across the United States. Alongside her artistic practice, Powers has worked extensively as an arts educator, with a particular engagement in Waldorf pedagogy and experiential approaches to art education. From 2012 to 2016, she directed the arts program at Monadnock Waldorf High School in New Hampshire, where she also served as faculty chair. She has continued to mentor teachers and develop arts curricula, including teaching experiential arts for an international Buddhist and Steiner/Waldorf-inspired teacher-training college based in Nepal and Scotland.
Powers currently lives and works in Boston, where she teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Northern Essex Community College. She also directs sculptural programs at JP Clay. Working closely with MassArt's Academic Affairs department, she curates the college's permanent art collection.
This exhibition is curated by Finnish artist Sampsa Pirtola in collaboration with the artist and presented with Rudolf Steiner Library (www.rudolfsteinerlibrary.org). The hours for this exhibition are Thursdays–Sundays, 1–5pm. (Closed on Thanksgiving.)