For printmaker Karen Beason, therapy looks a little different.
Sessions start and end in her basement studio amid a lifetime’s worth of tchotchkes and curiosities that could make for a vintage-Alaskana odditorium of sorts. Kaleidoscopic posters of various commercial fish from the last few decades of Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute advertisements are pasted on the wall above yellowed newsclippings depicting different species of Pacific salmon and starfish. A hint of psychedelica in the air, double takes are natural – at times one is almost certain the menagerie of hanging fish are grooving to the music blasting from the stereo like some sort of Ray Troll piece come to life. Think “Night at the Museum,” but instead of Ben Stiller and toy soldiers it’s Karen Beason and ocean creatures. I’m almost certain a halibut winked at me as I was turning my head away.
Tucked behind a shelf with jars of things like sea moss, horsetail, and magnetic black sand (building blocks for hand-made papers), you’ll find Beason tinkering with one of her many paper-making experiments. Pick up any vial and she can tell you what beach, what year, and with whom the sample was collected – the ingredients for her paper an archive of memories.
Stacks of Molly Hatchet, AC/DC and Eagles cassette tapes lay at home among stacks of tupperware housing a confounding diversity of collected fibers. A wall of over 100 plants on one side; a taxidermied ptarmigan on a shelf; plaster castings numbering into the 100s of every type of sea creature from every channel, sound, and cove across Southeast Alaska; paper-casted starfish; and a piñata-esque parrot hanging from the ceiling. Beason’s whimsical studio is a step back in time to the free-falling, dreamy days of old school Alaska we’ve all heard about but don’t get to see too often anymore.
When I first walked in, Beason briefly turned down her 1981 Sony tape-to-tape boombox to welcome me in and show me around. Shortly thereafter, the volume maxed back out and I was handed a Miller Lite: it had been a day and as her hands submerged into a bin of paper pulp, therapy was back in session.
Moose Poop… Paper
Born and raised in Southeast Alaska, it’s easy to see the connection between Beason’s artwork and her lifetime of memories across these landscapes.
The daughter of a commercial fisherman, as early as grade school she was on the water driving the handtroller. “I was little, maybe fifth or sixth grade,” she laughed, remembering her father trying to guide her in and out of massive patches of kelp.
Between skipper duties were some of her first experiences with what would become a lifelong art practice.
“When fishing was slow we’d go to shore and I would pick up every shell, every piece of driftwood, every crab – all of it – and then I’d have them all over the boat,” Beason said. “Crabs, shells, you name it, I glued it together and that’s what I did all the time when I was a kid. I still have them all.”
Fast forward some 50 years and her affinity for natural materials has only grown stronger. A family Christmas trip to Hawaii in the 90s offered inspiration for a craft she would quickly come to master as a printmaker and fiber artist.
“This young fellow was sitting at our hotel on a Friday night happy hour selling these prints, and they (depicted) Maui petroglyphs, but he had drawn on his handmade paper with a marker,” she said. “I was like, ‘Dude, why would you do that with a marker?’ So I came home and thought I could do that with Alaskan plants and Alaskan animals and that’s what started it. The printmaking kind of took off from there.”
Looking around her studio now, she’s got many different types of paper with roots in Alaskan landscapes: cedar, Devil’s Club, Goat’s Beard, rockweed, seamoss, and horsetail, just to name a few. There’s even paper made of foraged moose poop – a specimen she fell through a bunch of cattails into a pond to gather.
“It smelled really good when it was cooking,” Beason said, telling me to ask Annie Kaill’s Gallery manager Mycah Willis who helped her process it if I didn’t believe her.
Each medium is mixed with some alchemical combination of cotton and abaca to give it shape before being left to dry. Then, the hand-foraged, hand-made paper gets relief printed with a corresponding animal. Black bears are printed onto paper made from foraged blueberry bushes, frogs on horsetail, halibut and seagulls on beach grass, and so on.
“I mean, they kind of get the (base material) of where they’re from,” she said. “If you live in a tree, you get tree (stuff), you know what I mean?” The attention to detail and effort to do right by the natural sciences is an impressive throughline to her work and a nod to a life spent in communion with her surrounding environments.
Beason also has bins full of the only two types of naturally occurring paper in the wild: birch bark and wasp’s nest.
Whereas many relief printmakers use linoleum or wood to make their carvings, Beason takes to heart the true old school spirit of the scrappy printmaker by using a medium perhaps unique entirely to her alone in the entire multiverse of printmaking: Rubbermaid garbage cans. After cutting a piece to size, she carves right into the material using regular printmaking tools.
“Yeah, that’s the big secret,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
Original Printmaker’s Club
Around the same era as that trip to Hawaii, Beason was a student at the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) where she was part of a group of students trying to put together programming for an art degree. They called themselves the Original Printmaker’s Club and under Marshall Lind, the then Chancellor of UAS, Beason worked alongside other now prominent Juneau artists like David Riccio and Dianne Anderson to get the ball rolling.
“We were all into it, we were ready to rock-and-roll and to put UAS on the map,” she said. “We wanted an art degree – that’s what we were pushing for. The classes we didn’t have, we made.”
The club had three different paper teachers come in during the summertime, an experience that offered Beason a chance to experiment and play with different techniques she would come to master. Notable was a papermaking class led by Tlingit artist Edna Jackson who was living in Kake at the time.
“She was a fiber artist and she came and she taught us how to make paper out of plants,” said Beason. “Her big one was cedar bark, so if you go out to the university library at the main entrance, you will see some masks made out of cedar bark and those are Edna’s.”
In addition to these introductions to papermaking, this was also Beason’s first swing at printmaking.
“I did silk screen first, that was my first love until I fell in love with linoleum,” she said. Her first ever lino-cut was of a snake in Alice Tersteeg’s class. “My boyfriend at the time was a drummer and it was his tattoo,” Beason said.
Trying to show people that UAS needed an art degree proved difficult. As Chancellor Lind left, older Original Printmaker’s Club students graduated, and other key staff retired, getting an art program established at the time was frustrating. Despite that, Beason looks back on those rag-tag early days fondly, and those initial forays into paper-making set the foundation for a much larger practice that was beginning to bubble to the surface.
Casting into the Kenai
Into young and mid-adulthood, Beason continued helping out with family fishing operations, spending summers at a fish camp 12 miles up the Kenai River with her sister’s family while the Sockeyes were running. Continuing on with a love for collecting creatures, and now with a bit of formal art training, she started to push her paper experiments to the next level.
“I would cast everything,” she said of the time. Fish that were caught would first need to pass by Beason and her bucket of plaster before making their way to the fish cleaning station. There she would capture their mold to be used later on to recreate their form using paper pulp through a sort of inverted, paper mache-esque type of process. By layering different types of dyed paper pulp into the molded cast, she could get different colors and patterns in the shape of the fish.
In the early days of her commercial fishing, she said the environment was completely different.
“I’ve got pictures of me standing next to (a King salmon that was) 70-some pounds,” she said. “We were always taught to take care of [the environment] and not harm it, and that’s one of the things that used to make me mad… I watched other fishermen take more than they should, and now there’s no more fish and Kings on the Kenai.”
Even more recently as she spends summers outside foraging for materials for her papers, she can’t help but see how the ecosystems are shifting.
“It’s changed big time. When I first started collecting the seaweeds and starfish you could go anywhere,” she said. “Out Fritz Cove, before they cut all the trees down, used to be a wonderful beach … There were so many starfish, sometimes you couldn’t walk without stepping on them, and now you go out there and (might find one). They’re few and far between.”
As the world continues to shift, Beason’s art practice continues on – at times a way for her to offer commentary onto what she sees going on around her.
Perhaps one of her most popular projects were her die-cut Peace Ravens, the product of Juneau Arts and Humanities grant she got at a time of political turmoil in America just before 9/11. Having always loved the traditional Alaska Native story of Raven tricking his grandfather into letting out the sun before escaping through the smoke hole, she saw an opportunity to spread hope through this story.
“America was at war, and so I was making Peace Ravens (out of die cut),” she said. “They came with the story that Raven brought light in the past, and now he’s bringing peace.”
If you asked Beason what her message with her work is, she’d fire back some quip about there being nothing really to get. However, hidden somewhere in the excitement with which she tells you about which beach she casted specific fish on, who helped her gather the various plant specimen in the containers in her studio, and her long list of secret coastlines, there’s a gentle commentary being had on how to our appreciate the ways in which the landscapes around us are written into us.
“It’s relief. You don’t have to think about all things that are going on, or even just the minor things that are going on in your life that you don’t know what to do with,” she said of her art practice, taking a beat. “I think it’s just relief.”
Call it relief, call it therapy – regardless, her AC/DC cassettes and studio VHS collection serve as a bit of stability in an environment that never ceases to change.
Learn more about Karen Beason and see her prints on her website kbshandmadecreations.com This story is the second installation of “Pressing Silence,” a series of feature stories on traditional printmakers in Southeast Alaska. The series is made possible in part by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism’s Arts Reporting Grant.
Rachel Levy is a Juneau-based photojournalist whose work culminates at the intersections of environmental justice, arts and culture, and sustainable tourism. A 2022 graduate of Harvard University's Environmental Policy program, she is also the director of the award-winning documentary "Hidden in Plain Sight" that exposes the labor exploitation and colonial framework burdening Tanzania's safari industry.
