Spotlight Artist: Olesya Gusachenko
“There’s a magical element in finding small things in the sand—spotting nothing at first, then realizing seconds later a trove of miracles lies underfoot, with one tiny discovery leading to another,” says Olesya Gusachenko, a beachcomber and jewelry artist from Bruz, Brittany, France. She looks for seashells on every beach she visits, with her eyes set on the tiniest ones.
If she can’t find shells, Olesya will take a pinch of sand, a pebble, a seaweed branch, driftwood, or anything that catches her eye. No matter what she finds, Olesya delights in the possibilities of new discoveries, saying, “Tiny, puzzling pieces show up, and even with a background in biology, some of them stump me.”
Though Olesya’s collection can fit in a medium-sized box, when unpacked it could easily take over her house. To keep things organized, she has created a sort of miniature natural history museum with a curiosity-cabinet feel. She uses small nooks, fairy-sized dollhouse shelves and closets, glass bottles and tubes, apothecary jars, and even her own homemade ceramic shelves and sorting trays to store her vast and varied collection.
She doesn’t think it’s fair to pick favorites, but Olesya says star-shaped grains of “sand” from Okinawa and pitch-black magnetite sand from Bali were thrilling discoveries. Like so many beachcombers, she says, “Realistically, the coolest find is always the one I discovered yesterday.”
Olesya’s jewelry art started as a hobby ten years ago, first making jewelry while living on Okinawa Island, Japan, using finds from local beaches. She says her need for creative materials is what led her to beachcombing.
Since then, she has amassed a vast collection of seashells, sand, skate eggs, urchin tests, dried algae, insect and crustacean parts, pebbles, pottery, sea glass, and driftwood, collected from Japan, the U.K., Indonesia, France, the U.S., and more.
“I make delicate, unconventional jewelry—pieces inspired by and infused with elements of nature,” she says. To preserve them, she embeds tiny shells, grains of biogenic sand, and seaweed branches into layers of clear resin, finishing with a glossy dome. “This magnifies intricate structures and creates the illusion of items suspended in water. With each piece, I aim to create a wearable capsule that tells stories of the natural world’s beauty.” Olesya says her process isn’t just about turning shore fragments into treasure, explaining, “It’s also about giving them a place—framing them, contextualizing them, letting them breathe in a way that invites curiosity and reflection.”
In her curiosity-cabinet-style jewelry, Olesya takes a similar approach, creating tiny ceramic frames for her compositions of miniature sea treasures. She’s also begun working directly with found objects, casting certain finds into porcelain, preserving delicate details including microscopic ridges and growth lines on tiny shells. She sometimes leaves the ceramic pieces white, and other times she glazes or stains them to accentuate the details. Some are wearable, such as pendants, brooches, and earrings, while others are decorative or functional.
Olesya also builds clay shelves to display seashells and other objects, blending architectural elements with biomorphic structures inspired by marine life. “Their curves, undulations, and points of intersection often feel more naturally suited to what I collect.
Shells and bits of flotsam nestle into them effortlessly, as if the shelf could shift its shape to meet each one—like an organism responding to its environment.”
Her tiny ceramic beachcombing frames and trays are for sorting sand and shells. “They offer a dedicated space for examining, separating, and organizing beach finds in a focused, hands-on way, allowing the process of discovery to continue long after leaving the shore.”
Olesya says her art is a combination of her love for the small-scale and an admiration for all life. With a PhD in biochemistry and over 15 years of lab research under her belt, Olesya says her art and displays are often stylized as specimen collections. She says, “Truly, I am not just a collector; behind each shell, I see a creature who built and lived in it, and I want to bring their testimony to the world.”
Olesya is a self-taught artist, and researches techniques and methods whenever something captivates her. She joined the local pottery association to make her own ceramics, and says she’d love to master other techniques like silversmithing and glass molding in the future.
The best part of her process, according to Olesya, is what she calls “home beachcombing,” when she browses through her collection of tiny treasures for a piece she’s making. She says, “I can spend hours, even days, rediscovering and remembering how I picked each piece on the shore. Enjoying this so deeply, I decided to share the beachcombing-in-miniature experience with fellow gatherers and shoreline wanderers.”
Olesya hand-sculpts her ceramic mini beachcombing sets, mimicking rocky seashores, coral structures, and wave patterns. Each set is unique and includes a sorting tray, storage options, and a stylized magnifying glass. She says, “While I love finding nature’s masterpieces, I’m not obsessed with hoarding. I create to share, so I offer my sets accompanied by real beach samples, composed of sand enriched with tiny shells and unusual sand particles selected from my personal collection.”
“I am drawn to the overlooked—the tiny, the broken, the quietly strange,” says Olesya. Her pieces reflect this. “They are tributes to fragile structures, to slow decay, to the poetry of impermanence. Eventually, most seashells are broken, flowers and butterfly wings crushed and ground into powder by the elements. The purpose of my creations is to focus on these tiny wonders, to grasp their fragile beauty, and to write stories of sand grains, abandoned shells, and other gentle traces of living organisms. In making my art, I hope that people don’t just see them as pretty things but also feel the echo of a larger picture—of life’s fleeting nature and how the smallest things open the door to entire hidden worlds.”
Saint-Malo (Olena Znak/Shutterstock.com).
If you’re in Brittany, France, Olesya recommends a visit to Saint-Malo, a pirate fortress city with rich history and many beaches.
Rotheneuf (Patrick Poendl/Shutterstock.com). Caracale (Florian Augustin/Shutterstock.com).
She also loves visiting Rothéneuf, where the coastline itself becomes an open-air gallery. “There, the windswept cliffs are carved with over 300 eerie and weathered figures—pirates, sea monsters, grotesques, and saints—etched directly into the rock by a reclusive 19th-century priest.”
Mont Saint-Michel (Lock and Mary photography/Shutterstock.com).
Visiting Cancale, a seaside village overlooking rows of oyster beds, you can watch Mont Saint-Michel on the horizon. If the timing is right, she says you can see the grandes marées, or king tides. “The sea vanishes to reveal vast sandbanks and oyster racks, then surges back in with startling speed,” says Olesya. “If you reach Pointe du Grouin, on high cliffs just north of Cancale, you can watch the Atlantic sweeping across the bay in real time, reclaiming miles of land like a living creature, doing what it’s done for millions of years.”
Olesya says that the main reason she can’t stop beachcombing is that she doesn’t know how to relax on the beach. She snorkels and scubas from time to time, but she’s not there to unwind. “I’m there to observe, to collect, to engage. Leisure is incidental—what drives me is the quiet intensity of paying attention.”
Learn more about Olesya and see her work on Etsy, Instagram, and YouTube @dreamingshell, on Facebook @dreamingseashell, and on TikTok @dreaming_shell.
Learn more about seashells
Learn more about identifying shells, the history of seashell collecting, great shelling beaches, and the lives of the animals who make the shells we find on the beach. Articles ›
No live shelling: Be sure shells are empty and sand dollars, sea stars, and sea urchins are no longer alive before you bring them home.
This article appeared in Beachcombing Magazine Volume 51 November/December 2025.
