FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 4, 2015
Contact: Tamar Russell Brown — 978.425.6290
Most of us have strolled along the beach and found a shiny stone that turned out to be a piece of glass, worn smooth by many years (or decades…or centuries!) of tumbling through the ocean before finally washing up on the shore. Imagine an entire art show featuring the jewelry and other artwork made from sea glass. That’s the kind of unique exhibition coming up for native Leominster artist Deborah Cross.
“Each piece of sea glass has taken a journey, sometimes from one ocean to another,” Ms. Cross informs us. The powerful ocean currents can carry the broken pieces vast distances, and the buffeting action of the water, rocks and sand take away the sharp edges and create the lustrous textures that make common glass look like gems. “Where did the glass enter the ocean and how far has it traveled?” she always wonders. “And I wish each piece could tell me how it began, what it used to be, and how long it has been tumbling from deep sea to shoreline.”
She has been fashioning jewelry of gold, silver and copper, as well as of beads and semi-precious stones, for some 25 years. She brought sea glass into her repertoire about ten years ago.
Ms. Cross has so far found two primary ways to transform these artifacts into objects of art — by using them to create jewelry and to make decorative pieces she calls “windows.” “I love sea glass and I love to wear jewelry, so about six years ago I put the two together!” she says. The “windows” are designed to decorate the wall or a window at home or office and catch the sunlight as it comes streaming in. In both forms, the sea glass she employs comes in a dazzling variety of shapes made partly by the ocean and in colors developed by the glass makers.
“The most common colors are Kelly green (found in Sprite and tonic bottles), sea-foam green (Coke and other soda bottles), and brown (traditionally used for beer and ale). Rarer colors are red, orange, yellow, gray, teal, pink, cornflower blue and aqua.” These latter colors have always been harder to manufacture. Red and green were often used for ships’ lanterns. Some pieces consist of very thick, almost black glass, the remains of old wine bottles carried by European vessels sailing in the Caribbean. Crews on these ships sometimes had to jettison their wine or other cargo. Other times, of course, those ships went down in storms — crew, passengers, cargo and all.
On land, garbage dumps are an abundant source of sea glass, and they are often located near the sea. Refuse is burned and rainwater often carries it down to the sea. That kind of sea glass is called “bonfire” glass. With the melting effect of the fire, then the erosion process of the seawater, these pieces are often especially lovely, since they’ve been on a sort of “double journey.” Ms. Cross explains that Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor was a garbage dump for 20 years and is covered in glass.
The artist has traveled all over the world and has found much raw material for her artwork — not just sea glass but also shells and coral found on beaches on Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and elsewhere in New England, as well as in Hawaii, Mexico, Sicily and the British Isles.
“Sea glass is diminishing around the world, as mankind turns to plastic instead of the beautiful old glass containers of days gone by.” This is not just a matter of aesthetics, but of survival for many species of animals that live in our oceans. Ms. Cross notes the brutally sad fact that small plastic bags are floating around all over the Earth’s seas and resemble jellyfish. Sea turtles and many other aquatic animals are sometimes victims of humankind’s “cast-offs” and pollution. “Once ingested, those plastic bags strangle the intestines and kill.” The artist intends her art to remind her patrons and fans of how precious the Earth’s seas are. She wants to “heighten awareness, the better to guard our beautiful oceans.”
This event will take place at The Bull Run, 215 Great Road, Shirley, Mass., on Sunday, April 19, 1 – 3 p.m.
For more information, visit www.sitkacreations.com
