Deborah Hansen wasn’t always an artist, but she’s been a big reader since she was a child. Growing up Catholic, a lot of what she was reading obsessively was larger than life — the lives of saints, stories of the Bible, and retellings of fairy tales.
A lot of it puzzled her.
“When I was a little kid, I remember reading these fairy tales, and going — that is not right. It is not right. How could Sleeping Beauty be alive for 1,000 years? That doesn’t make any sense. Or then you read in the Bible about someone being alive for 800 years.”
Sleeping Beauty, saints, biblical stories and mythical figures from Ancient Greece all make a powerful statement in Hansen’s show at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, showing through Friday.
Called “Conversations,” the show is Hansen’s way of engaging old or even ancient stories — fables, religious texts, mythology — in a way that speaks to the present day.
“Maybe we should tell each other stories as a way to bridge the gap of understanding between us. These sculptures are my versions of what I have been thinking and talking about,” Hansen wrote.
“Conversations” is dominated by 11 large ceramic works. What makes them arresting are the many life-like faces — often piled on top or alongside each other to form the body of the piece. Some faces protrude, others are fused together or recede into the sculpture.
The sculptures describe concepts — power, sorrow, justice, dreams — or people in old or ancient stories, including David the King, Goliath, Sleeping Beauty, The Good Queen. Each piece tells a story and also relates to the other works. Many are thickly layered with symbolic detail: leaves, skulls, mythic animals, glinting metallic points and linework.
“The work I spent sculpting, carving, drying, and glazing the stones gave me time to think about those topics and which ones are fundamental to human existence: Dreaming, Sorrow, Power and Justice, Life and Death. I came to think of them not just as topics of conversation, but concepts permeate art, writing, and religion, and are common to the human experience,” Hansen wrote.
The figures seem like references to the past, but Hansen views their symbolism firmly from the standpoint of 2025. These are complex figures, in her view, with personalities and inner conflict.
Take King David from the Bible. “He’s not 100% good. He’s a complicated person. And I think many people in their life do the wrong thing and hopefully do the right thing sometimes,” Hansen said. “I guess I value introspection … And I sometimes wonder about King David. I mean, he wrote some beautiful poetry, so maybe he was (introspective). I think that has to come from somewhere.”
The series is bookended by runestones inscribed in Elder Furthark (a language dating back to the Third through Eighth Century) with messages from a much more recent history:
“Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, State of the State Address, 2025.
“Maybe time running out is a gift”: excerpt from the song “If We Were Vampires,” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, 2017.
Decades in the making
When Hansen was in her 30s she had her first child, one of those babies with a miraculous ability to sleep soundly for long periods of time. Her father gave her $300 and told her to spend it only on herself.
This was the early ‘90s, Hansen said, and “back then you could take an entire class at UAA for like 275 bucks, so I bought a class.”
Hansen enrolled in an evening drawing with former longtime University of Alaska Anchorage professor Hugh McPeck. It turned out to have a long-reaching impact.
“(McPeck) was very positive about things, and particularly after he had the heart transplant, he was even more positive. So then he said, ‘You should think about getting a (Bachelors of Fine Arts degree).’ I thought, ‘no I can’t.’ But then I thought, ‘well maybe I can.’ ”
Hansen started taking classes like color theory and three-dimensional design. She managed to complete some semesters while also working full-time as the director of marketing at Alaska Telephone Utilities (a predecessor of ACS) and parenting a toddler. But with the arrival of her second child, a job change, and the maelstrom of family obligations, kids getting sick and scheduling catastrophes, she set the BFA project aside.
When she had some space in her schedule, she’d complete a course or two, but it wasn’t until she retired — just before the COVID-19 pandemic — that she was able to finish her degree program.
More than 30 years after taking her first art class, Hasen presented her BFA thesis show at UAA in 2023. Similar to “Conversations,” the exhibit involved many face casts — 44 different faces mounted on plaques, lit up with candles like religious icons.
To pull it off, she had to refine a particularly fraught process of drying and firing the pieces, Hansen said. She cracked every piece she put into the kiln from August to November the year of her thesis.
With help from assistant professor of ceramics Alanna DeRocchi and a visiting artist, Hansen eventually nailed down a complex, down-fire process. Each piece in the IGCA show took a full week to fire, she said.
For the faces, Hansen created silicone face castings of people she knows, often using what she knew of the person’s personality and interests to assign them a character of the sculpture.
The model for “Justice” is a former appellate lawyer for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who argued and won important cases for women’s rights, Hansen said. “Justice” has tires around her neck, posing the question, “is she being strangled or is she rising above that?” Hansen said.
“Understanding our own relationships to these concepts, and whether people care, or don’t, about them is especially important to me in the modern American political climate,” Hansen wrote. Her most pointedly political piece, “Man of Sorrows,” depicts Christ as an immigrant, wracked with suffering and grief.
When she was forming her plan for the show “I was thinking about story. I was thinking about conversations. And I think about why people don’t listen to each other? And I was thinking about how we need to talk more,” Hansen said.
“Each of these pieces embodies a conversation about something important to me. I hope that they speak to you too.”
Also on view at IGCA until Sept. 26
Duos — a dynamic experimental show curated by j.Reto, a founding member of CIRCLE5 art group. Each work was the result of two artists working independently on different areas of the piece, without knowing what the other’s part looked like. The results are surprising — and in many cases surprisingly cohesive.
Drawn North: Portraits in Texture — Rhode Island-based artist Suzanne Yeremyan developed a series of abstract works following a winter 2025 artist residency with Alaska State Parks. The results are experimental landscape portraiture, grounded in the textures, patterns, and movements found within a natural environment.
“Conversations,” “DUOS,” and “Drawn North” will be on view 1-4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, with a closing reception at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 26 at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage (427 D Street Anchorage; igcaalaska.org)