She goes out before the sun is up. After storms, especially. The beaches on Cape Ann are different after a storm — the water has moved things around, turned things over, pushed glass up from wherever it had been sitting. Jackie has been doing this for twenty-three years, and she still knows exactly what she’s looking for before she finds it.
Not every piece of sea glass. The right pieces. Specific shapes, specific colors, the weight of a shard in her palm, the way the frosted surface catches light at a particular angle. She walks with intention. She knows the difference between a piece that wants to be something and a piece that doesn’t.
Back in her Gloucester studio, the sorting begins. Colors into groups. Shapes into categories. Then comes what she calls “visualizing a series of puzzles” — figuring out how each found piece wants to exist in the world. A barrette. A pendant. A brooch. A garden stone. The glass decides most of it, she says. She just figures out the setting.
“She figures out how each found piece wants to exist in the world. The glass decides most of it.”
“I’m visualizing a series of puzzles. Each piece of glass has a shape, a color, a weight. The challenge is finding how it wants to be worn — what setting, what metal, what design. Sometimes I know immediately. Sometimes a piece sits on my table for months until it tells me.”
Sea glass gets its look from time. Glass from bottles, windows, old ships and old kitchens gets broken, washed out to sea, tumbled against rocks and sand for years — sometimes decades, sometimes longer. The ocean frosted it. The shape it ended up with isn’t the shape anyone intended. That’s the whole point. Every piece Jackie finds has already been through something.
Cape Ann is a rocky peninsula north of Boston — Gloucester, Rockport, Essex. The beaches there aren’t the wide sandy stretches people picture when they think of the Atlantic coast. They’re rough. Ledge and cobble and cold water and the particular smell of low tide in the morning. Good conditions for finding glass. Also good conditions for developing a certain kind of patience.
Twenty-three years of pre-dawn beach walks builds a specific knowledge. Jackie can tell you which beaches give up what colors, which seasons yield the most glass, what a productive morning looks like from a hundred yards away. She has the stories. Ask her where she found a specific piece and she’ll tell you the tide, the weather, what she was thinking about when she spotted it.
The resulting jewelry has a quality that’s hard to manufacture: the look of something that was found, not made from scratch. Every piece started as something broken in the ocean and ended up as something worn on a person. That’s a longer journey than most jewelry takes.
Jackie’s work is shown at Maine Pottery Co.’s Portsmouth gallery on Pleasant Street. She comes in for events and brings her full collection. The best way to see the work is in person, where you can hold a piece and ask her about it. She has the best stories.
The work is all one of a kind. There’s no production run on sea glass.