Clipperton Island
— — the ring the ocean almost forgets.
Not only on a wall.
“A coral ring in the open Pacific, more than a thousand kilometres from the nearest coast. French territory, uninhabited. The lagoon inside the atoll is closed off from the sea now, brackish and stratified, no longer holding coral. A single volcanic rock rises on the southeast — twenty-nine metres of trachyte, the only high ground for hundreds of nautical miles around. Seabirds keep the place.
Clipperton 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.
Clipperton, officially Île de Clipperton or Île de la Passion, is an uninhabited coral atoll in the eastern Pacific Ocean, about 1,280 kilometres southwest of Mexico and roughly 5,400 kilometres east of Hawaii. The ring of land covers about six square kilometres and encloses a closed lagoon of similar size. France administers the atoll directly from Paris as part of the State's private domain. The highest point, Clipperton Rock on the southeast rim, is a 29-metre trachyte outcrop, the only volcanic remnant of the atoll's basement above water.
No one lives on Clipperton. The last permanent residents, a Mexican garrison and their families, were evacuated in 1917 after the lighthouse keeper had killed several of the marooned survivors. France's sovereignty was confirmed in 1931 by an arbitration award from King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, who ruled against Mexico's competing claim. The French Navy visits at intervals to maintain sovereignty markers. Scientific expeditions stop occasionally to study the seabird colonies and the surrounding reef. Otherwise the atoll is left to itself.
The lagoon inside the ring was open to the sea until the early nineteenth century. Wave action and storm-deposited coral rubble eventually closed the passages, sealing it off around 1839. Without exchange, the water has slowly freshened from rainfall — annual precipitation runs around 5,000 millimetres — but stratified into an anoxic lower layer that smells of hydrogen sulphide. The outer reef circles the atoll completely; the inner lagoon, about 7 metres at its deepest, no longer hosts living coral.