Winnipeg
— — a prairie city where two rivers meet.
Not only on a wall.
“Winnipeg sits at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, where Indigenous peoples gathered for trade for thousands of years before the city was named. Long horizons. Cold winters that drop below thirty. The Exchange District holds turn-of-the-century warehouses; the Forks holds the rivers. The light off the prairie carries a long way. — from the studio
Winnipeg, 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.
Capital of Manitoba and largest city on the Canadian Prairies, with a metropolitan population around 850,000. Winnipeg sits at the historic Forks, the meeting of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, used by Indigenous nations for travel and trade for at least 6,000 years. The city was incorporated in 1873 and grew quickly as a railway hub linking eastern Canada to the western provinces. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, opened in 2014 at the Forks, was the first national museum located outside Ottawa.
Winnipeg sits at roughly 50 degrees north on flat prairie that runs unbroken for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Winters are severe: January averages around minus eighteen Celsius, with frequent stretches below minus thirty. Summers reach the low thirties. The wind moves across the open land without obstacle, earning the corner of Portage and Main its old nickname, the windiest corner in Canada. The light is long and oblique through most of the year, and the sky reads enormous.
The Red River flows north into Lake Winnipeg, draining a basin that reaches into the Dakotas. The Assiniboine joins it from the west at the Forks. Both rivers have shaped the city's history through flood: the 1950 flood displaced over 100,000 people; the Red River Floodway, completed in 1968, has prevented an estimated forty billion dollars in damage since. In winter, the rivers freeze hard enough to host the longest naturally frozen skating trail in the world, sometimes ten kilometres long.