Devon Island
— — the silence of a place no one calls home.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest uninhabited island on Earth, set in the Canadian High Arctic. A polar desert of buff limestone and shale, gullies cut by meltwater that runs for only a few weeks a year. Scientists use it as a stand-in for Mars. The Haughton crater in the west holds the long memory of an impact that landed almost forty million years ago. Mostly the wind has the last word.
Devon Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Devon Island sits in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, bounded by Lancaster Sound to the south and Jones Sound to the north. At roughly 55,000 square kilometres it is the largest uninhabited island on the planet. The Devon Ice Cap covers the eastern third, rising to about 1,920 metres. The west is dry polar desert. William Edward Parry charted it in 1819 and named it for Devonshire. Access today is by chartered Twin Otter from Resolute Bay, on Cornwallis Island, in a short summer window between July and August.
No permanent residents. No road, no settlement, no village beyond the seasonal camps that scientists pitch in summer. The closest community is Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island to the north, about 240 kilometres away by water. Inuit oral history records seasonal hunting on the south coast, but the island was abandoned in the late 1930s after a short-lived RCMP and trading post at Dundas Harbour failed. What you hear in summer is wind across scree, the occasional bark of an Arctic fox, and water moving under crusted snow.
The Haughton impact crater sits in the western lowlands, about 23 kilometres across, formed roughly 39 million years ago when a meteorite struck what was then a forested coastal lowland. The cold, dry climate has preserved the structure unusually well. Since 1997 the Haughton-Mars Project, a NASA and Mars Institute field station, has used the crater as a Mars analogue for testing rovers, suits, and field protocols. The exposed limestone, dolostone, and impact breccia hold microfossils older than the impact itself. Geologists from across the world rotate through the camp in July.