Walking down the beach, Britta Adams stopped to watch the last vestiges of flowing water retreat with the falling tide. In its wake on the sand was left a branching, lightning-like imprint — a landscape of frozen motion carved into the stillness. Aloud, she wondered how it would be possible to capture that same aftershock of movement in her own two-dimensional art practice.
Wicker basket on her hip, she kept walking — on a treasure hunt of sorts, though not for the traditional booty. Less shiny than briny, her muse is usually found within the intricate forms of intertidal critters: starfish, barnacles, seaweed, and kelp her main objectives. No novice to the hunt, she knew exactly when and where to go searching.
This particular treasure hunt was on her home court of Buggy Beach, a stretch of coastline just south of town in Ketchikan. Bookended on either side by two snow days, the surprise of March sunshine and shallow choir of early-season birdsong pushed us into a trove of salty wealth. After a short collection period, her basket was full of tidepool jewels and we were ready to print.
A Body in Motion
“Motion is what brought me into art,” says Adams, a cyanotype artist. Specifically, the motion she was seeing in the ocean beneath her as a swimmer in the wilderness landscape of her Southeast Alaskan home.
A lifelong water spirit, Adams could be aptly described as an extreme athlete: wild swimming in the notoriously unforgiving waters of the Inside Passage. Notably, she’s swam the 8.2-mile Pennock Island Challenge (a circumnavigation of Pennock Island in Ketchikan) multiple times, and was the first ever to swim the 10 miles of the famously rocky Wrangell Narrows — a feat that required two wetsuits and months of preparation.
“The water has always symbolized a sense of freedom,” Adams said. “I think it started out when I was little, because in the pool it’s a sense of buoyancy — you literally feel lighter in the water. Then when that went on to ocean swimming, it was the spaciousness and the quiet I needed at that time in my life, and an adventure and excitement and humility.”
Her new oceangoing pastime has recently bent towards a pretty intense paddleboarding practice. Standing on Buggy Beach, basket back on hip, she pointed somewhere in the range of 10 miles out from shore towards Dall Head and shared one of her favorite experiences during a paddle out there and back. Sun shining, water flat — the conditions were finally right for a journey she’d been eyeing and it was one of those few days when oft-ignored bikinis get to come out in Ketchikan. Something between muse and guide, her time on and in the water has led to an intimacy between herself and the diversity of aquatic plantlife she encounters on such trips.
“When I’m swimming, I’m looking at seaweed all the time to read the current, to read eddies, to read what the water is doing: The seaweed is always telling me where the water is flowing and how fast it’s flowing,” Adams said. “It’s just me and the seaweed in the ocean, sometimes for many miles — so, I’ve been able to look and see all the ways it moves and it’s fascinating when the light hits it in different ways. One of my favorite things is to be face down and watch it flow as the light streams in, and if I could even try to capture a piece of that in a cyanotype that’s the goal.”
For Adams, her art practice is rooted into this idea of motion — both that of her own body, and that of the bodies of water she is so often in communion with.
“Swimming in a pool is like this controlled environment, and then I got tired of swimming in the pool, so I went out in the ocean and started swimming in the ocean and paddle boarding,” she said. “Those were all motion-based activities, and that freedom of motion brought me to art and into cyanotype.”
Terrestrial Gardening and Ocean Harvesting
A cyanotype artist, Adams creates her work by treating paper with reactive chemicals that, when exposed to UV radiation, shape shift from a pale green into a deep, dark royal blue. The parallel between the color of her prints and that of the deep ocean is, of course, no coincidence.
A form of contact printing, Adams overlays intricate compositions of collected objects, often dried seaweed, before exposing her medium to UV radiation from the sun if she’s outside or from a controlled lamp set up in her studio. The parts of the paper covered by objects and thus shielded from the light remain white after processing, while anything exposed to UV radiation darkens into that iconic blue.
Ironically, what led Adams down this path of ocean and motion actually started a few years back with still life photography of plants from her garden.
“I just love fresh cut flowers, and I wanted to grow some so I could have them. From there, I ended up landscaping our property and selling them, (but) then I discovered that I didn’t really enjoy clear cutting my garden for sale,” Adams said. “I thought I would just take some beautiful photos of them, and it started in the greenhouse.”
Green thumb an understatement, Adams’ greenhouse is a thing of legend around Ketchikan.
“I learned about still life photography, so I started doing it in the house,” Adams said. “Flowers are living art and you only get them for a short amount of time, so it was a way that I could kind of preserve that beauty with a photo.”
The tradition of cyanotype actually began as a way for botanists to document and share different specimens they were working with and studying. For Adams, though, this was just the first step of her journey — it wasn’t until summertime spent out on the boat with her family that she thought to integrate harvested seaweed into her practice.
“I just decided to try it with some seaweed, or try it with some beach treasures that I found when we were out for long weekends and weeks at a time, and that got really exciting to me,” Adams said. “Ocean treasures just piqued my interest, like, ‘Wow, this is cool – I haven’t seen anything like this before.’ I really like doing it, and the possibilities are endless.’’
Quickly, her beach walks became treasure hunts and with the sun out during the summer, she began running prints right there on the deck of their family boat. A family affair, it became the norm for her children and husband to bring back pockets full of everything from sea glass to sea urchin husks for her to experiment with.
With the shift to away from flowers and into seaweed, Adams felt the sirens going off in celebration knowing she had finally found what she was looking for.
“It’s like every avenue of my life has come to a gathering point with this,” she said. “My love of movement, my love of being (in, around, and) on the water, my family is on the water all the time. It works out seasonally with my lifestyle, like this is how I live to begin with: so it’s all systems go, it’s green light everywhere, so that it feels like the most natural thing ever.”
Seasonality
Life in Southeast Alaska, notoriously and nearly across the board, isn’t one with steady streams of reliable sunshine coming in. Uniquely for that reason, seasonality and flowing with the weather are intimately integrated into Adams’ process.
“I feel that cyanotyping in the studio and cyanotyping in the wild represent the two seasons of living in Ketchikan,” she said. “You have spring and summer where everybody is out, going, doing, creating, exploring, and there’s just kind of an uncontrolled freedom and play about it. Then in the wintertime, everything’s very hunkered down, indoors, more detail oriented, and the two different styles are really represented in the work.”
Like so many others who live in this region, summertime for Adams represents a sort of mania. With longer days and somewhat warmer weather comes that special sort of Southeast Alaskan jam-packed schedule of long, social days making up for all the time indoors over the previous few months. Right when those wheels are about to come off, however, Adams says those first October rains start up and staying inside in the studio is a welcomed reprieve.
There is an interesting yearly throughline despite the seasonality of her work: Harvesting for winter projects actually begins in the spring and summer.
“In the summer, I have to decide what I’m going to press and dry to use in the winter for studio work,” Adams said. “Some of the seaweeds won’t press and dry — they just don’t do well, so that just takes trial there. Then when you press a piece of seaweed, that is the shape it is going to stay in unless you break it.”
In full Alaskan fashion, she added: “You’ve got to work with what you’ve got to work with when those resources are available.”
On that sunny March day on Buggy Beach, our resources included a dead crab, barnacle husks, various types of kelp, and a hefty jar of sea glass Adams carried with the attention one would give a newborn from her car. An alchemist at work, Britta combined chemically-treated paper with different ratios of salt chunks, vinegar, and hydrogen peroxide to add depth, variation, and a bit of magic to the prints.
While exposing outside, there’s an uncontrolled element: she’s dealing with sand, wind, clouds, and I imagine a rocking sensation when on the boat, in a way that removes the precision she’s able to achieve in the studio environment.
While Adams taught me how to expose my own piece, a small dog ran by to check out what was going on, spraying sand all over half-exposed paper and shifting the composition of kelp, starfish, and crab claws around. Ironically, that was my favorite of those we made together: an unexpected nod to the playfulness and flow at the foundation of Adams’ larger practice and lifestyle.
Learn more about Britta Adams and see her prints on her website nordicbluestudio.com. This story is the fourth 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.
