Beach Fragments as story tellers

My plans to share these stories in 2025

Welcome to my wee corner of Substack. I am a seasonal artist living on the Isle of Arran, off the west coast of Scotland. I am the custodian of approximately two acres of land that includes a woodland, a meadow and my wee garden. I offer a seasonal book arts project for paid subscribers if you are interested and you can read more about that HERE. Grab a cuppa and lets delve into our relationship with the shifting seasons….

I have already witten about how I use many of the finds I gather from the beach and my slight obsession with pottery fragements in a previous post HERE. However, I thought I would do a second piece to talk about the place these fragments hold in my creative mind. It seems a good piece to be writing as I contemplate my creative year ahead.

Wandering along the beach looking for pottery or glass fragments is something I do pretty much daily. Yes, I run an Etsy store that is an ideal place to sell handmade items using these precious finds. However, it is far more than that. Searching for these precious finds is a ritual to me as each piece I find tells its own story. Some of the seaglass hasn't finished it’s story and hasn’t been tumbled enough to I throw it back into the sea for the story to continue. Mostly, the glass is well tumbled but I now only collect very special pieces as I would have far too much otherwise. The colour I search for most is lilac as that is really quite rare. Strangely, I never find small pieces of lilac seaglass, just larger pieces that are more than robust. I find this an interesting contradiction that such a delicate colour should show up in such a robust way.

If you know my work well, however, you will know that is the pottery that is my first love. I can now fairly accurately date most pieces I find and that helps me imagine a story. My favourite is the rather unassuming mid century pottery pieces that most people walk past. There is something utilitarian about these pieces that appeals to me. The pieces that I believe originate from the 1950s have a special place in my heart as they come from a time of recovery. I used to listen to my grandparents talk fondly of the 1950s when the world was recovering from the worst of times. The recovery was slow and painful but life had to move on and so it did. My grandparents lived in Glasgow, a city that was bombed regularly. Imagine how much pottery was broken during that time. The 1950s witnessed a slow return to full capacity as households began to reform.

Of course, commercially, the decorative pottery has far more value and I made these into pieces of jewellery to include brooches or pendants. I feel this work is now behind me however as I seek to find more creative ways to work with my beach finds. One of the things I used to make was my wee pouches of meditation ‘stones’. I trained in meditation over a four year period with a Buddhist monk and have been teaching it for many years. I find that a lot of folk find it difficult to get started with this most vital of life tools. So I used my fragments to help. I paint on the small pieces of seaglass designs that represent small meditations. The pouch contains these meditations recorded on cards. The idea is very simple. You select one at random and then have a wee go at the meditation. Over time, your ability to get into a meditative space develops and I like to think these wee beach finds have helped you on your way.

In my own creative journeys I use these beach fragments as both inspiration but I also use some ‘in’ my work as well. This is what I want to focus on during 2025. I have a brand new collection with the working title ‘Shorelines’ coming out later this year and I would like to take folk on a journey with me. The intention is make some project packs so that folk can dip their toe into the beautiful waters of using beach fragments in and through their artistic journeys.

I am excited about that. I am also going to use our summer Book Arts project for paid subscribers as a space to work with beach finds. More on that nearer the time. At the centre of all these intentions is the belief that each fragment tells a story and, in finding the fragment, we have the job of taking the story forward. How special is that?

I hope as 2025 begins to unravel I might encounter some of you in these creative journeys and I very much look forward to sharing some of that here with all of you via my newsletters. Do you already collect beach finds? If so, what do you do with yours? I am sharing a wee gallery reminding you of some of my projects in case that is of any use to any of you.

However, my favourite story is this one. At the beginning of this journey I wanted to send pieces from the island far and wide but thought I might do a wee bit more than just list them in my store as beach finds. So, I created a small box of beach finds and contextualized these with small pieces of hand dyed fabric, threads and beads in the hope that this wee box might spark some imagination in others. I could not have known back then that this wee box would become my best seller of all time selling over 129 times at the time of writing. It makes me so happy to think of all the folk that have received their wee box and what they might have done with the contents. I began the story and they will have finished it. As it is you reading this I will let you into a little secret….. Every time an order comes in for one of these boxes I pop down to the beach to collect specifically for that order. I know! But somehow this seems really important to me…..