Balikpapan
— — a coast that learned to refine the light.
Not only on a wall.
“A port city on the east coast of Borneo, set on a curved bay opening to the Makassar Strait. Oil has shaped Balikpapan since the first well came in above the bay in 1897, and the Pertamina refinery still works the waterfront under a near-equatorial sky. Beyond the city the rainforest of East Kalimantan begins, and just inland the new Indonesian capital, Nusantara, is rising. The strait carries tankers through the night.
Balikpapan, 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.
Balikpapan sits on the east coast of Borneo in East Kalimantan province, on a deep curved bay facing the Makassar Strait. The 2020 census placed its population at roughly 688,000, making it the second-largest city in the province after Samarinda. The city's modern history begins with the first oil strike at Mathilda well in February 1897, and it has been a Pertamina refinery town since the company nationalised production in the 1960s. It now serves as the principal logistics gateway for Nusantara, the new Indonesian capital under construction inland.
The Makassar Strait defines the city. The bay runs deep enough to take ocean tankers right up to the refinery jetties, and the strait beyond is one of the busiest tanker routes in southeast Asia, carrying crude and product between the Java Sea and the Sulawesi Sea. The harbour at Semayang handles passenger ferries to Sulawesi; container traffic moves through Kariangau on the inner bay. Mangrove still holds long stretches of the inland shore, and on a clear evening the strait turns the western sky a long even orange from horizon to oil flare.
Balikpapan sits just south of the equator, and the year here is shaped less by temperature than by rainfall. Daytime highs hold close to thirty-two Celsius the whole year through, nights near twenty-three. The wetter months run from November into April, with afternoon convective storms common; May through October is drier and clearer. Annual rainfall averages above two thousand millimetres. The forest inland — peat swamp and lowland dipterocarp — holds humidity at the city's edge, and the sea breeze off the strait moderates the worst of the heat through the afternoon.