Primary Research - Beach Combing

I think beach combing is one of the most instinctive types of collecting, it's hard to come back from a trip to the seaside without picking up any souvenirs like pebbles, shells and for me, sea glass.

Sea Glass

Sea glass is made when a broken piece of glass becomes worn down by the sea and sand over many years to create a frosted, cloudy looking pebble - the most common pieces are white and green, but it's really exciting to find an unusual colour or some with traces of a pattern or words. I love walking along the beach and seeing a little pop of colour in the sand and discovering a really nice rounded piece of glass - there are many different shades in my collection. I like to imagine where it came from, what form it took, who used and held it before it was broken, lost and forgotten.

Pirate Glass

Pirate glass found on the beach will appear black on the outside, but when held up to the light, colours like green, amber and purple may show through. This kind of sea glass usually pre-dates the 1800s. It was used on ships by sailors, merchants and pirates to contain goods like alcohol - it was perfect for these voyages because the dark glass protected the contents from sun exposure and was very durable, surviving rough journeys at sea. Drinking alcohol was generally a safer option than water which could be easily contaminated. It's known as pirate glass due to it's age and the likelyhood that pirates used it, especially since early rum bottles were made in the Caribbean giving pirates easy access. You can get an idea of the age of this glass by its thickness and presence of bubbles inside, showing it was hand blown. 

When I go beach-combing I feel really excited to find pirate glass - it's hard to spot because it looks like a normal black pebble, but the moment of holding it up to the sun and seeing colour is quite magical to me. It reminds me that there is much more to the ordinary if you look a bit closer, observe and pay attention to the small things in the world. I hope I can communicate this feeling through my art work for this project.

A handful of my seaglass arranged in a gradient from white to dark green, thinking about ways we can classify collections

 

A random selection to show the abundant variety of colours and shades

Sea Pottery

Another thing I love to collect on the beach is ceramics. The sea gives them a really nice softness that's so different from a newly broken piece of pottery, and there are no bounds to the variety of colours and patterns you can find. Some are clearly much older than others and I find them incredibly thought provoking; like with the glass, I wonder about where it came from, what it looked like and who it belonged to before becoming trash (only to become treasure again). Turning over a piece of pottery to find a pattern on the other side gives me the same joy as finding pirate glass, the discovery aspect really drives me to collect more and inspires me to make art about it. I think I could incorporate them into my work by deriving patterns from them and creating backgrounds for my images of collectibles, plus I like the idea of using them as a basis for a colour pallette.

Here I have grouped them by colour. All the pieces are from the same beach trip - I like to keep the collections separate so I know where they came from

This is a group of pieces that are a single colour, the tumbling process makes the colours quite subtle and soft.

A group with classic blue patterns that appear to be very old

A group from a different beach trip, including a piece of a very thin handle and the rim of maybe a tea pot or something similar

A group of miscellanenous objects from the beach like fossils, pebbles and a big piece of pottery with deep ridges

Using the scanner to get a detailed close up of this unusual pebble

Piece of rose quartz found on the beach

A heart-shaped box full of objects collected on a holiday to Cornwall. I think the box makes them seem  like sentimental trinkets, but I like the idea of displaying them in a more museum-like style to give them an elevated status and make them seem like important artifacts.

These pieces are not from the beach but ones I have collected from walks on the nature reserve where there is an area of gravel that has a lot of broken pottery and other discarded stuff in it, and I collected the pieces that had patterns which I have arranged by colour in the image above which I used the scanner for. I felt quite self conscious digging around in the rubble where people were walking by but I still found it rewarding to get some interesting pieces, I particularly like the older ones with blue willow style patterns.