Sable Island
— — a crescent of sand the sea forgot to take.
Not only on a wall.
“A forty-kilometre ribbon of sand sitting alone in the North Atlantic, three hundred kilometres east of Halifax. Wild horses have lived on it for two and a half centuries, gray seals haul out by the hundred thousand, and the fog comes in most mornings. There are no trees. Visiting requires a permit and a window of weather.
Sable 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.
Sable Island is a crescent-shaped sandbar in the North Atlantic about 300 kilometres southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is roughly 42 kilometres long and only 1.5 kilometres at its widest, riding the edge of the continental shelf. Parks Canada designated Sable Island National Park Reserve on December 1, 2013, making it the country's forty-third national park. There are no trees on the island; the dunes are held in place by marram grass. The shape of the island shifts each year as currents and storms move sand along its length.
There are no roads, no harbours, and no permanent residents beyond a handful of Parks Canada and Environment Canada staff. Visitor numbers are capped, typically below 250 a year, and every approach requires a permit, a chartered fixed-wing flight from Halifax or a Zodiac landing through the surf. Fog wraps the island most mornings from May through August. The dominant sound, when the wind drops, belongs to the gray seals: about 400,000 of them breed on the beaches each December and January, the largest colony in the world.
The Sable Island horse herd has lived on the island since the 1760s, when Boston merchant Thomas Hancock released animals seized from deported Acadians. The herd has been legally protected since 1960 and now numbers about 500 animals, organized in roughly fifty bands. They are entirely unmanaged: no veterinary care, no supplemental feed, no human contact permitted. The grey seal colony, which collapsed to under 2,000 in the 1960s, has rebounded past 400,000 and now pups in midwinter across the beaches at both ends of the island.