I have lived on this coast most of my life, and I have been picking things up off it for nearly as long. Sea glass started as a pocketful on the way back to the car. It became the work.

Where the glass comes from

Every piece in the gallery began as somebody else’s rubbish. A bottle, a jar, a windowpane — broken, thrown out, and washed into the sea decades ago, when coastal towns still put their refuse where the tide could reach it. The ocean spent the next thirty or forty years taking the edges off.

I gather it by hand, a piece at a time, along the New Hampshire shore. There is no shortcut. A good morning might produce a handful; a cobalt fragment might be the only one that season. That is why no two pieces I make are the same, and why some colours take years to collect enough of.

How the work gets made

Back in the studio I sort by colour, then by size, then by shape, and then I wait until something suggests itself. A curve of driftwood becomes a tree. A cluster of frosted white becomes snow. I do not cut or grind the glass — whatever shape the ocean settled on is the shape that gets used, which is the whole constraint and most of the pleasure.

Everything is mounted on acid-free backing and hand-cut mats, and framed to last. The designs and compositions are entirely my own.

Why it is worth doing now

Sea glass is a finite thing. Glass containers have largely given way to plastic and aluminium, shoreline dumping ended generations ago, and every piece taken off a beach is not replaced. What is in the water now is essentially the last of it. That is part of why I would rather turn it into something that stays in a family than leave it in a jar on a shelf.