Lorrie Potvin — Repurposed - theHumm June 2025

By Sally Hansen

Art… and Soul

Lorrie Potvin creates highly imaginative metal sculptures from scrap metal that she can’t resist collecting everywhere she goes. Her spontaneous response to “Why?” is that she can’t look at anything without imagining a way in which it could be repurposed. So discarded forks and chopped up harrow disks and metal vegetable strainer pieces are combined with a career-long collection of metal automotive scraps to become original sculptures in her professionally trained hands.

Potvin’s imagination knows no bounds, and her sculptures range from endearing owls to gleaming, geometric wall hangings and intricately patterned large garden globes. She explains that when she looks at a jumble of metal shapes spread on a counter or thrown in a box, she immediately visualizes a plethora of 3-D possibilities. Her current wide-ranging collection of repurposed metal scraps will be on view at the annual Art in the Garden show this Father’s Day weekend at Kiwi Gardens (687 Harper Road near Perth). Gardeners beware — one of Lorrie’s sculptures may well be an irresistible addition to your botanical display.

Rusted Development

That’s the name she gives her metal art. But the more I learn about her tumultuous life, the more I suspect she is playing with the phrase “Arrested Development.” A quick search tells me “In psychology, arrested development refers to a situation where an individual’s emotional or psychological growth is halted or delayed. This can occur due to various factors such as trauma, neglect, or other significant life events…” Lorrie has written two books that chronicle her astounding history of surviving and overcoming trauma, abuse, and significant life events.

Potvin’s first book is titled First Gear. It was written in 2015 under her previous name, Lorrie Jorgensen. It is a “Motorcycle Memoir” chronicling her road trip on Thelma D. (her beloved 2009 Harley-Davidson) from Ottawa to Winnipeg and back. She had bought herself a Harley when she turned fifty, was living with Multiple Sclerosis, and still processing her tumultuous upbringing with an abusive father, alcoholic mother, and sexual identity issues of her own. Her second book, Horses in the Sand, was written in 2022 under the name she only claimed after she learned via DNA testing that the man who had sexually tormented her was not her biological father.

The back cover of Horses in the Sand describes her second book as “… a collection of stories that document a queer Métis woman’s journey from her sparse beginnings as a child to becoming a tradeswoman, teacher, and artist… the stories describe what it was like to grow up as a girl who was starkly different… and how ‘coming out’ became a lifelong process of self-acceptance and changing identities.” It also tells the story of how she finally discovered who her birth father was, and that she belonged to “an Indigenous community whose presence she had always felt but to which she never knew she belonged.” In our June 2022 issue we published a review by Rena Upitis, the Founding Director at Wintergreen Studios and Professor Emerita at Queen’s University thehumm.com/online/article.cfm?articleid=3168 .

Writing the books helped a child who “never believed she’d be good enough.” When she was seventeen her mom had given her $20 and a suitcase, and Lorrie hitchhiked from her home in Deep River to Ottawa. She spent two years as a secretary and quit to become a dishwasher. At 21 she got a job in an auto body shop in Manotick. She asked to become an auto body repair apprentice and had to go to school at Algonquin College. She is frequently taken for a man, and was in trade school for a full week, worrying about which restroom to use, before she had to tell the instructor she was a woman — the first in their program. When she got her trade license her marks garnered her the Inter-Provincial Red Seal in Autobody Repair and Refinishing. She became the first woman to work at the Municipal Garage Complex of the City of Ottawa, and she still enjoys the memory of backing huge fire trucks into the garage bays.

After several years with the City, Algonquin College offered her an instructor position teaching her trade in the Autobody Repair and Refinishing program, the same program she had graduated from years earlier. A few years later she began teaching in the automotive section of a new program — Women in Trades and Technology (WITT).

After eleven years at the College, Potvin applied to the Technological Education program at Queen’s University and was one of 28 students accepted out of 300 applicants. That decision probably saved her life. After three weeks as a student at Queen’s, she became completely sober for the first time since she had started drinking and smoking at the age of thirteen. She also got a personal trainer, lost a lot of weight, gave up smoking, and started eating vegetables instead of sweets. Ironically, she also developed terrifying tingling in her feet and legs. She continues to handle her eventual diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis as just another obstacle to overcome.

She continued her education at Queen’s, earning a Special Education Specialist post-graduate certificate. She then taught high school shop classes for eight years before taking a medical retirement. In her words, “It really was a full circle moment — I wasn’t allowed to take shop in high school, and now I’ve become a shop teacher.”

On her exceptionally thorough and rewarding website at lorriepotvin.ca , she describes herself as “a queerishly two-spirited Métis…” She doesn’t mention that she has a wonderful sense of humour. Her description of dealing with bras after losing weight had me laughing out loud. In her memoir she writes, “To my delight… I found that I can arrange my breasts and nipples in various positions when wearing a sports bra… I’ve also come to realize that regardless of the time you spend… it never lasts, and after ten minutes my breasts are smooshed into a uni-boob and my nipples are cross-eyed.” Oh yeah.

Since her retirement, Lorrie is spending more time pursuing her arts career in her well-equipped shop at the ideal country home near Perth that she shares with her wife, Paula Robert. When she isn’t in her shop, she is hard at work on her writing career. She loves mysteries, and this past December her upcoming novel titled A Trails’ Tears won the 2024 Pride Award honouring her as an emerging crime writer within the LGBTQIA+ community. The award, made by Sisters in Crime, states, “A Trail’s Tears follows the stories of two women who are strangers to each other — youth wellness worker Grace, who’s looking for Sonny, a missing Indigenous teen mom, and Anna, a street-smart young woman caught in the trap of human trafficking and desperate to escape.” Potvin’s website has also just announced that the Crime Writers of Canada have selected her unpublished novel as a finalist for their prestigious 2025 Awards of Excellence. The award winner will be announced on May 30 — just after our deadline — we wish you the best, Lorrie!!

Epilogue: Meeting Lorrie Potvin and learning about her life has affected me profoundly. She completely changed my “old fart” reaction to tattoos. More importantly, she opened my eyes a little wider to the incredible diversity and adversity that our fellow humans experience in their lives. I highly recommend her website and some time spent with her short stories as a very enjoyable empathy expansion exercise.

Artist Trading Card

Who Lorrie Potvin

What Artist, Author, Tradeswoman and Teacher

Where lorriepotvin.ca/artstuff ; lorrie.potvin@gmail.com

When June 13-15 (Father’s Day Weekend), Kiwi Gardens Art in the Garden, kiwigardens.ca/rusted-development , 687 Harper Road, Perth; October 11 & 12, Perth Studio Tour, Bridget O’Flaherty’s Studio, 988 Brooke Valley Road, Perth

Why “I create because I can’t help but visualize the hidden potential of scrap metal and what it can become.”