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Laura Beamer:
Recycling Finds A Fun Haven In The Oregon Cascades

by Loretta Fontaine, reprinted with permission from The Crafts Report

Hang around Laura Beamer’s booth at a show long enough and one can’t help but smile. Beamer’s art is as vibrant and fun as her personality!

Drape one of her signature bracelets of candy-colored bottle caps around your wrist and she’ll regale you with stories of how she collects her recycled treasures. A red dragon cap? Beamer and her husband Benjamin order “Singha” beer when they eat out at Thai restaurants. The trick, she recalls with a chuckle, is to convince the waiter to bring out the normally discarded dragon cap with the bottle of beer. A few hand gestures to the befuddled waiter will usually get the point across, and then the entire staff will be fishing through trash cans to retrieve more bottle caps for her collection!

Beamer makes her sterling silver jewelry with quirky recycled materials - bottle caps, vinyl records, and license plates - in the rural town of Oakridge, Oregon. Her “fun jewelry that is fun to wear” has won top awards at national art and craft shows and can be found at retailers across the country.

Beamer feels fortunate to be able to make a living in Oakridge, an area in the Oregon Cascade mountains that is climbing out of an economic depression. “Oakridge is a small timber town that never recovered from the timber cut backs in the 80’s and early 90’s,” Beamer says. “When I moved here in 1988 the town was in a total down spiral - it was dying!” Today, mountain bikers are moving into Oakridge for it’s outdoor recreation, and the town is slowly reviving. But Beamer doesn’t rely on the local economy for her sales.

With an airport less than one hour away, she and her husband fly across the country to approximately one dozen retail and two wholesale shows a year. Tapping into a national marketplace allows her to live in what she considers nirvana. Surrounded by the Willamette National Forest, hiking, camping and skiing are right outside her doorstep. “If it’s sunny or snowing we get up early to work so we can spend the rest of the day outdoors!,” Beamer exclaims. “Our valley is surrounded by breathtaking mountains! It’s so peaceful here - we’re a one stoplight town.”

The forest is what brought Beamer to the area. Growing up in Eugene, Oregon and Camas, Washington, she moved to Oakridge in 1990 for a job with the National Forest Service after receiving a degree in forestry from Central Oregon Community College. Fighting forest fires is how she met her husband. “For three months Benjamin and I knew each other on the fire line covered with grime and wearing heavy coats and boots, “ she recalls. “We cleaned ourselves up, then went on a date to the Lane County Fair!”

She stumbled upon a career in craft in 1992 when a neighbor had a loom for sale on a porch. Beamer bought the loom, and figured out how to weave. Her husband was now taking architecture classes at the University at Oregon in Eugene, and Beamer spent her evenings in the university library reading every weaving book she could find.
Weaving flat panels out of natural and recycled materials (such as rubber inner tubes), Beamer twisted the panels into vessel forms, and embellished them with her collection of found objects - glass shards, bottle caps and license plates. After years of selling her work at shows Beamer experienced intense lower back pain at the loom and needed a new direction. The line of recycled jewelry was born in 1999. “I looked at those bottle caps in a different way,” Beamer recalls. “It’s really cool that every bottle cap has it’s own little piece of art!”

Vinyl records soon became jewelry as well, but it was an idea that struck her one week after she got rid of her entire record collection. “I had to go to Goodwill to buy the first record I punched into pieces,” she says. Using recycled material appeals to Beamer’s practical side. “It feels good to extend the life of something a little longer,” she says. “We live in such a disposable world.”
Because the heat of soldering would destroy the printed design of the bottle caps and license plates, and melt the vinyl records, Beamer and her husband devised cold connections - rivets - to fasten the recycled materials. The sterling silver foundations have an industrial chic look - inspired by the chrome of a car bumper or the grooves of a record.

Beamer works in a former Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall she and her husband purchased in 1993. Beamer shuddered when she first saw the structure, but her husband saw potential. What was formerly an open 1,400 square foot hall with 100 theater seats and two restrooms is now a colorful home filled with art and surrounded by towering Douglas fir trees framing a sublime mountain view. Beamer’s studio holds an industrial machinist tool for forming her jewelry, and drawers and drawers of bottle caps mounted to the walls. A small television with VCR perches on a stool in the corner of the studio, essential because Beamer prefers to watch movies as she works. “I like the chick flicks and comedies best,” she laughs, “I am trying to get work done and the dramas have me watching the screen too much!”
Beamer’s husband joined her full time in 1994. “Ben has a great sense of design and is great at figuring out how to make things,” she says. “I tell him an idea that I have and how I want it to look or work and he figures out the little details.”

A sense of fun permeates Beamer’s business. At shows she interacts with her customers as if they are long-lost friends. “I like to joke around and listen to their stories.” Her colorful catalog is peppered with funny pictures and whimsical quotes. “Yes, I do listen to all the records before I punch them into little pieces!” reads the text next to a photograph of Beamer peering through the center of a 45 rpm disk. Packets of Wonka’s bottle cap candy are passed out at shows and mailed with orders.
Although her approach to business is fun, Beamer is serious about pursuing success. In 2003 she was a NICHE award finalist in the recycled category for her stunning twelve piece bottle cap necklace. In the future she hopes to pursue more wholesale and catalog opportunities and cut back on travel to retail shows.

A recent challenge to Beamer’s business came in November 2004 in the form of a letter from the lawyers of a major soda brand. It asked her to cease and desist using their bottle caps in her jewelry due to trademark infringement. “It was a really scary letter,” she says,” They’re such a gigantic corporation and it’s just Ben and me! I probably won’t drink another soda in a red and white bottle again, that company has put me under too much stress!” Beamer is working with the The Oregon Arts Commission for legal advice to come to an agreement. As she sees it, using post-consumer waste as an artist is a protected form of free speech. Besides, Beamer is working to develop her next great idea. “I’m always looking ahead to the next ‘new’ thing,” she laughs, “maybe a kinetic line of jewelry that doesn’t include bottle caps!”

Loretta Fontaine, a jeweler who is on the of the faculty of the Arts Business Institute, writes on the arts from her Albany, New York studio.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Laura Beamer
P.O. Box 804, Oakridge, Oregon 97463-0804
web site: laurabeamer.com
email: laura@laurabeamer.com
phone: 1-888-FUN-ART5