Drifting down her path along the beach, Meghan Chambers stops mid-sentence with her left ear cocked upward. It’s a unique morning in Juneau, with inverted clouds teasing the peaks of nearby Sitka spruce trees. This morning, like many others, Chambers stays close to what she considers home: the shoreline.
“Canadian geese,” she says, waging guesses with her eye line on where they are. Moments later, the flock sprinkles into view from above the canopy making their way southwest – perhaps aiming towards Baranof Island, where Chambers herself spent the majority of her childhood.
“Twenty three Canadian geese, 17 mallards – kind of a boring day to be a bird watcher,” she laughs, silent as the flock of geese brings some motion to an otherwise still morning. In other parts of the country, this time of year might mean a morning’s walk spent crunching on top of dead leaves. Here in Southeast Alaska, however, many days over the last year of Chambers’ life have started out with crunchy footsteps atop frozen seaweed instead – mornings spent on the shoreline a time for inspiration and observation, serving as a homecoming of sorts.
Salty Beginnings
For Chambers, beginnings are coastal. The beginnings of her own story, even, took root on the shores of the remote fish hatcheries she called home during her childhood. The daughter of a hatchery manager, art, science, and daily life were interwoven from the get-go.
“The hatchery was fun, I mean, I also didn’t know anything else,” Chambers said. “We [Chambers and her sister] homeschooled and then we were out on the beach all day turning over rocks. We would go out in the boat, pretending to help with season, and just be very involved in the unique Tongass life cycle of ocean nutrients coming back into the forest.”
Before moving to Sitka for middle school, her family primarily lived at the Port Armstrong Hatchery on Southern Baranof Island – a place only accessible by float plane or boat. Additionally, with only about six-to-eight people on location as staff at the hatchery at any given time, art was always part of the picture as a means of entertainment.
“We went through paper, paints and colored pencils like nobody’s business,” Chambers said, nostalgic for the time spent drawing scenes and characters from the books she and her sister would read.
Surrounded by unspoiled wilderness, it’s easy to draw connections between the themes of many of the projects and series she’s done as a printmaker to the ecology that was so central to much of her childhood. Her large body of work includes a series of botanical prints; a recent series of Alaskan landscapes in collaboration with Kristin Vantrease of Adrift Prints; a show she curated on the theme of ichthyology; and an upcoming long-term print project related to the birds she spends most mornings with out on the beach.
“I’ve always been somebody who likes to be outside in a very relaxed way,” Chambers said. “I think art helps me capture and remember it, and that’s probably why I always come back to it. I also feel like it’s what I know the best, and so you draw what you know and the beach is what I know.”
Penny the Platen Press
Tucked just a few miles from the Mendenhall Glacier underneath the colossus of Thunder Mountain is a behemoth of its own proportions. More metal than ice or rock, this 2,700-pound leviathan is a Chandler & Price platen press (named, of course, Penny) that Chambers uses for letterpress.
Originally made in the 1910s, and operating on a motor from the 1940s, Penny is a force to be reckoned with.
“I did some minor fixing which involved buying enormous wrenches that I’ll only ever use for this, finding a tool that other letterpress printers especially made for it, and then borrowing said tool from another printer all the way across the country who mailed it to me,” Chambers said.
Maintenance is key on a machine like this, as many of the parts are no longer being manufactured.
“I was FaceTiming [a letterpress friend] and had a wrench in my hand and I had a lamp on. It’s fascinating because the bolts are threaded the opposite way than how most bolts are threaded, and if you strip the threads on the bolts they don’t actively manufacture them anymore. So you have to find somebody who’s a machinist to make you a bolt that size.”
A visit to Chambers’ home studio is a step into an atmosphere that can only be described as steampunk Alaskana. Mid-January, the studio is alive with the buzz of a space heater placed just above a small window with a view of the snowpiles testament to the capital’s record-breaking December weather. Harry, the taxidermied Dall sheep, stands watch mounted to the wall in the corner over Penny – the Prohibition-era lass placed on front and center stage. Shells, king crab husks, miscellaneous bones and drawers full of wooden type scatter the studio.
As with most things in Southeast Alaska, the printmaking scene and culture are beautifully intertwined across various communities. At over 100-years-old, Penny has lived a few different lives (including a rumored flirt with the great Stephen King).
Penny’s known life starts in Sitka in the hands of The Sitka Sentinel before she made her way to Juneau in service of the Printing Trade Company. Eventually she was passed along to the artist and writer Sarah Asper-Smith before landing in the hands of acclaimed printmaker Evon Zerbetz in Ketchikan. A mysterious damsel, somewhere along the line a rumor started that Stephen King printed on Penny when he visited Sitka many moons ago on a book-writing vacation – the name “Penny” a nod by Chambers to King’s iconic character Pennywise.
Eventually, Penny fell out of use in Ketchikan but through word of mouth Chambers got connected and was able to give life back to the 1.35-ton press for just the price of the Alaska Marine Line shipping to get her to Juneau.
“It’s amazing how cheap stuff is when it’s really big and heavy,” Chambers laughed.
Just looking at Penny is enough to enter a H.G. Wells-esque steampowered, Victorian-era reverie. Once Chambers gets her running, the massive fly wheel gets to spinning and the 96-parts of wood, iron, and what must be at least a little alchemical metal begin their choreography. As Penny sings out the calming exhale and regular thump of her work, it’s easy to slip into deep thought.
“I like the methodical nature of pulling prints,” said Chambers. “I think it’s my version of meditation, or that kind of Zen people find when they have a sport or an exercise that they do regularly. I feel like the closest I get to a flow state is carving or printing.”
Behind Penny is a pegboard with various posters Chambers has made, many with an activist lean to them.
“Printmaking is inherently political, and people need ways to be political right now,” Chambers said. “I’m starting to venture out into wood-type posters and more political art. Trying to use this print medium as a way to get my voice out there, and more important is trying to find a way to help other people get their voice heard totally, and print has done that since its inception.”
Head Goose
As much of a hermitage as printmaking can sometimes be, Chambers is unique in her capacity as a community builder. Through her business Salt Water Press; The Laundromat Gallery, which she co-owns; and Wayzgoose, an annual print fair in Juneau which she spearheaded, she has been instrumental to the resurgence of printmaking happening across Southeast Alaska.
“It’s such an exciting time in Juneau right now,” Chambers said. “Printmaking is really just blooming and I can’t pin it on anything in particular.”
Last October, Chambers came up with the idea for and helped orchestrate the first annual Juneau Wayzgoose print festival. With the honor of Head Goose, she sounded a goose call that called to order a two-day long event with over 90 attendees registered for a weekend of potlucking, print classes, and community building. During the same month, she curated and participated in an exhibit at The Laundromat Gallery titled “Womxn in Print” that showcased the work of female and non-binary printmakers from Alaska and beyond.
“Even before everyone was talking about going analog on social media, I wonder if as a community at large we’re all searching for ways to heal ourselves a little bit and make it through these really adverse and depressing political and environmental times,” Chambers said. For her, leaning into the physicality and tactile nature of printmaking often offers relief from the difficult state of the world.
Wayzgoose, specifically, was a way to bring light and understanding into a larger context of political upheaval. At the event, attendees ranged from teenagers to folks in their 80s coming together from all walks of life over their shared interest in print.
“As we try to navigate the current political climate, I think empathy and sympathy go a long way. Of course you have to hold moral ground, but Wayzgoose has been such a healthy way to practice that,” Chambers said. “It was a nice reminder that everybody ultimately wants to help out their neighbor even at a time when it can feel like every man for himself. It’s been such a good light and been really inspiring and helpful in bringing some joy at a time when it can be hard to find that.”
A Flooding Tide
If beginnings for Chambers are coastal, she’s back to the shoreline now.
“I really plateaued with the goals of Salt Water Press and the business model and how it fit into my life as a mom,” she said.
That being said, the client work she has focused on over the last few years has brought some really incredible work into being. A collaboration with musician Josh Fortenberry for the album art for his recent release “Tidy Memorial” was a personal favorite for Chambers.
“He sent me the lyrics, and so I would listen and read the lyrics and pull out some themes, and it’s a beautiful album,” Chambers said. The final image was a relief print of a tombstone depicted as a stained-glass window looking out on stormy seas and rays of sunshine. Other favorites included a collaboration with Paradise Cove, a New York City fish taco pop-up named after an area near Haines that both the owner and Chambers herself have personal family ties to.
Despite the success of these projects and many others, trying to fit custom-designed client work into her lifestyle as mom of a toddler and a soon-to-be mom of a second baby called for a shift in seas.
“I had an epiphany probably a month or two ago to just halt client work and take my portfolio […], digitize that, and sell stuff wholesale.”
With this flooding tide will hopefully come more time for activism-centered work with a strong political and environmental lean. Unsurprisingly, a long-term bird print project is also in the works.
Learn more about Meghan Chambers and see her prints on her website saltwater.press or on Instagram @salt.water.press. This story is the first 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.
