Marcia Poirier is a Yankee-born descendant of the Acadians, the French settlers who in the late 1600s came to inhabit the Atlantic shores of what is now known as Canada.
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Creative since her youth, Marcia began her quahog shell jewelry by chance. While spending a day in her favourite activity of beach combing, she spotted the shape of a heart in the colouring of a shell she plucked from a beach in New Brunswick, Canada. With only the crude tools at hand, she carved it out and wore it as a pendant. Requests from others for pieces of their own led to a four-year search for better processes and better tools to sculpt the rock-hard shell.
Only later did Marcia learn that she was making “Wampum,” and that it was an all-but-lost art dating back hundreds of years. Today, Marcia shares her love of shells with others through sales of her Wampum jewelry, while continuously designing new and ever-more-stunning pieces. |