All Shades of Blue: Kellie Swanson & the Magic of Modern-day Alchemy

from Montana Woman Magazine, Issue 14, September/October 2021

Letter from the Editor

By Megan Crawford

Studio Images by Ben Goertzen

Between the forget-me-nots and cornflowers, somewhere near the lupine, past the delphinium and bluebells, is a truest shade of blue. The deep ocean before the storm, the last wisps of dusk; dark, inky velvet. Beneath the surface is a magic brew: add yellow-green ferric ammonium citrate, tangy orange potassium ferricyanide, a drop of sunlight, a splash of water, and suddenly a crisp white sheet of paper can hold the sea.

Cyanotype, a 19th-century photographic printmaking process, is among the earlier photography methods and the process of choice for Kellie Swanson, a Bozeman-based artist.

“I hated cyanotype. It didn’t mesh with me, I was bad at it, I swore it off forever… it’s kind of ironic now that it’s my job and I love it so much now,” she laughs.

Kellie Swanson and I met in Montana State University’s photography department. We showed up at the same time to turn in our first big final projects— the first two students to show up— and that never changed. Of the students in the department, Kellie was one of the few I knew would almost always be somewhere in the lab, processing film, making prints, perfecting layouts. So it comes as no surprise that she now does it for a living.

Graduating from msu in 2018, Kellie knew that somehow, alternative processes (alt for short) would be in her big picture. In response to the standard rotation of ‘what are you going to do after college’ questions, Kellie had a plan: “my pipe dream is to do alt somehow and make it my actual job— I have no idea how I’ll do that and I probably won’t be able to, but that would be cool!”

Like a lot of folks in the last year, Kellie lost both of her jobs in the wake of covid. Searching for sometime to fill the time, Kellie looked back to alt. After all, she had just bought a new desk— “I want to make something because now I have this cool desk I want to sit at!” she recalls. So, two years after graduating from msu, Kellie revisited cyanotype and started making prints in her bathtub.

The process started with traditional paper prints and eventually worked its way to a plain denim jacket in her closet. Moving from paper to clothing— creating sustainable, wearable art— changed the game.

“People started responding to it really well, and it just sort of took off from there,” she notes. From the denim jacket came denim shirts, jeans, cutoffs, dresses, overalls, bandanas, and the sweetest bunch of baby clothes, all adorned with their own unique field of wildflowers.

“I consider it like building a landscape, making a photograph out of the actual pieces of the earth,” Kellie explains. “The flowers I collect, I can arrange into a new bouquet or landscape.”

**Kellie in her garage studio**
image by Ben Goertzen

All of the clothing pieces Kellie uses are secondhand, found at local thrift or vintage shops; the flowers are from local fields and farms. When people send in clothing for custom work, it’s usually their favorite pair of wellloved overalls, sometimes accompanied by their local wildflowers. Every single piece is one of a kind, made in Kellie’s garage studio. “It’s such a rewarding job— doing something you love and creating something beautiful every day is unreal.”

“I always wanted to make alt commercially viable,” Kellie states. “I didn’t want to go into galleries, and I didn’t want to do the whole fine art world— I wanted a commercial thing I could market and sell to everyday people.” Due to alt’s nature, it’s almost always not considered commercial. It’s obscure. It takes far more time where digital creates shortcuts, and it’s not easily mass-produced. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be commercial— alt prints can hang on gallery walls and in your closet. When you can print on almost anything, why limit yourself to a frame?

But it’s more than photography— it’s magic. Maybe it’s cliché, but there’s no other way to describe these analog processes. They’re all chemical formulas and equations, but when you take a step back, you can’t help but feel those fringe bits of magic in the ethers. If you’ve spent any time in a darkroom, processing film or developing prints, you know it— the wonder of creating something from a blank piece of paper right before your eyes, blooming awake.

With 19th-century processes, though, every print has a certain level of surprise. They’re not easy to duplicate, especially when you’re working with botanicals. Every leaf and petal catch and hold light differently— placement, base material, available ultraviolet light, humidity, and processing all affect the final print.

“It turns out different every time! I’m not a very methodical person with my process… I just go with it and see how it turns out, and it feels so much like magic to me. I get so excited after every piece I make— it’s so different every time.”

Now a year into running a cyanotype business, the next dream is around the corner: a communal art co-op in Bozeman, providing a workspace bigger than her garage and a home for the energy of artists working in the same space. For now, Kellie organizes Last Tuesdays— rotating backyard art events on the last Tuesday of every month for folks who are making pretty much anything: ceramics, fleece wear, jewelry, baked goods, paintings, pasta— all made by hand. It might not be a warehouse art co-op yet, but it’s helped build a sense of community that we’ve missed so much in the last year.

And that’s where the co-op dream comes in: once you’ve worked in a collaborative art environment, you will almost always miss it. MSU offered that creative hive, but what do you do when you leave a space like that?

You create it.

“To people who are hesitant to put their art out there: people are going to love it! You might not know who those people are yet, but they’ll find it and love it. There needs to be more art out there and more artists and more people just going for it. This was my dream less than a year ago, and now it’s my full-time job. Just go for it.”