Handmade creations inspired by the natural world

Published 4:30 pm Wednesday, November 19, 2025

When she was in grade three, Meriam Linder came up with the business name, “Wilderness Wonders” for a Yellow Pages ad activity in a class at school. In 1999, at the age of 17, she purchased that name as her official art business license and has been creating and selling her work as a full-time working artist ever since. She recently joined Homer’s Ptarmigan Arts co-op gallery as its newest member.

Marketing herself under the tag line, “tradition, material and curiosity converge in Meriam Linder’s durable, authentic artwork,” Linder is a prolific artist creating in a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, carving, jewelry, collage, bookbinding, block prints and fiber arts.

Inspired by the natural world around her as well as ancient traditional designs of Alaska’s Indigenous peoples, her paintings, drawings and block prints showcase marine life, wildlife and landscapes, among other themes. One of her favorite mediums is painting with watercolor.

“Watercolor is so beautiful, evasive and underappreciated,” she said. “Transparent paints glow in their own way and there’s virtually no takebacks with watercolor. You’re committed.”

Using antlers and bone she gathers in remote Alaska locations, Linder creates wearable art, including barrettes and hair sticks, as well as bookmarks, ornaments and carved wall masks, like her stylized raven with the face carved from caribou antler and embellished with grouse feathers. This design is influenced by traditional Yup’ik masks of the Alaskan west coast and the carvings of other traditions, both old and new.

“Ivory and bone, besides suiting my passion for working with natural material I often find myself, are marketable,” she said. “I find it rewarding to create usable, wearable pieces and that’s been the focus of my business.”

She makes several different styles of jewelry, including earrings and necklaces using materials like porcupine quills, stone and glass beads, bone and ivory. Her Midnight Sun Landscape earrings are original collage work made from torn paper. These torn paper scraps are also used in her landscape collages that come in myriad sizes, from larger, frameable pieces to smaller cards to micro-sized buttons and magnets.

“When I create collages, I’m finding peaks and water in the paper scraps,”’ she said. “It’s a very organic and responsive process, discovering rather than imposing. Little torn away scraps, like fractals, recur as smaller and smaller mountainscapes. This leads me to make the tiniest landscapes, embedded in resin under a magnifying glass dome to create durable earrings. And my recent landscape collages have been an interesting middle ground. They’re a physical, tangible product, but even I have to admit that I’m making art.”

Linder’s tiny, detailed paste paper bookbindings are created from bits of watercolor paintings, old picture books, commercial fine art papers and other items. She also creates original linoleum block prints that feature marine life like walruses and octopus, as well as landscapes. She also works in the fiber arts, mainly quilting, and in photography, capturing and showcasing her passion for nature.

Working in so many mediums, Linder said that the most fun medium is the next one she approaches.

“I feel like each new medium or style is an extension of all the others, and the more I explore, the more I believe it’s all one thing,” she said. “I’m extremely curious, wanting to know how things work and why things are done certain ways, so I love trying my hand at new techniques. The opportunities and challenges found in new mediums are fun to explore.”

Married to Maynard Linder, a fellow self-employed artist and owner of Dancing Man Knives & Ulus, the couple are raising their family in Homer where Linder herself grew up. Brought up in a semi-subsistence lifestyle that nurtured a love and appreciation for wilderness — a theme that shows up in her work through the materials she uses and the scenes she portrays — from a very young age, her family supported and helped to build a foundation for her creativity and approach to making arts and crafts.

“I remember learning to crochet and cross stitch as a kid,” she said. “We always fixed mistakes until it was done correctly, and that crafting standard permeates my work still. Most Christmases I would get a book and supplies like origami, polymer clay, saws and bits, a small loom. I was introduced to gesture and contour drawing early and got an SLR film camera for my 13th birthday. The energy of line, and the malleability of composition have been foundational ever since.”

Self-taught early on, Linder later got her Associate of Arts from the University of Alaska at Kachemak Bay Campus. Through the years, she has participated in a variety of local art groups, including the Kachemak Bay Watercolor Society, Old Inlet Printmaking Studio and Life Drawing classes, among others. Always eager to share her creative knowledge, she has herself taught several workshops, including a weekly series for elementary students and bookbinding at the Girdwood Summer Arts Camp, along with local bookbinding classes and open studio sessions in her personal workspace.

“I find it very rewarding to share my enthusiasm and resources, and it’s fascinating to see the different directions people go,” she said. “The collaborative creativity and motivation in the open studio were awesome and I hope to offer that again soon.”

Linder describes herself as an opportunistic learner.

“I pick things up from books, by watching someone making things, taking workshops and classes and even sometimes by inspecting a piece and wondering how it was made,” she said. “Whatever I’m working on, I try to represent it in its best light. Maybe I find a rough piece of material and wonder how to salvage and elevate it into a useful, polished piece. Or I notice a little detail in the environment and play around to capture it in a photo. In paintings, I find myself half capturing and half discovering my subject as I create it on paper.”

While Linder has exhibited locally at galleries including Fireweed Gallery and Inua, she prefers to sell her pieces outright. An art entrepreneur, she is experienced in product development and crafting, marketing, web store design and retail operations and has through the years wholesaled her work around the state and through her previous businesses, Local Showcase, HandsofAlaska and Alaska’s Best Wholesale Show.

Maneuvering between a plethora of mediums, Linder is compelled to create and is continually exploring.

“Sometimes I’m able to channel that compulsion into finished art and products, but I’m always tinkering, looking and exploring,” she said. “Being in Homer, the seasons — nature and business — ensure I don’t get stuck in one thing too long. I tend to go full tilt at something, then get tired and drop it for something else.

“Fortunately, there’s a cyclical component that helps me resume some of my projects to continue earning a living. The pressure of the summer season is always a good motivator. I credit my career to a mindset, to even realizing that it’s possible to make a living this way. I think there are people that would be well-suited to art entrepreneurship but can’t conceive of it. I’m confident that everyone has creativity, if they can let themselves access it.”

Find Linder’s Wilderness Wonders work seasonally at the Homer Farmers Market and Inua on the Homer Spit, year-round at Fireweed Gallery and Ptarmigan Arts downtown, and online at ptarmiganarts.com.