Java
— — rice terraces under a line of volcanoes.
Not only on a wall.
“A long volcanic island between the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean, carrying more than half of Indonesia's people on a strip of land smaller than England. A spine of thirty active volcanoes runs the length of it, and the rice terraces step down their flanks. Borobudur and Prambanan still stand in the central plains, a thousand years after the kingdoms that built them.
Java, 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.
Java is the world's most populous island, with about 156 million people on roughly 138,800 square kilometres. It stretches around 1,000 kilometres east to west between the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean. A volcanic spine runs the length of the island and includes Mount Semeru, Mount Merapi, and Mount Bromo, all still active. The island holds Indonesia's capital Jakarta on its north-west coast and the royal cities of Yogyakarta and Surakarta in the central plains. Its rich volcanic soil has supported wet-rice agriculture for more than a thousand years.
Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world, was built by the Sailendra dynasty in the ninth century from roughly two million blocks of andesite, a volcanic stone. Forty kilometres east, the Hindu temple complex of Prambanan was completed a few decades later by the Sanjaya dynasty and rises 47 metres at its tallest spire. Both were buried under volcanic ash and jungle for centuries, then rediscovered in the early 1800s. They sit a short drive apart on the Kewu Plain, ringed by the same volcanoes that buried them.
The island runs tropical and humid, with a wet season from November through March and a dry season the rest of the year. The volcanic ridge cools as it climbs: Bromo at 2,329 metres is cold enough at dawn for woollen jackets, while the rice terraces of the lowlands sit warm. The clearest mornings are in August and September, when Merapi's plume stands sharp against the sky and the terraces at Tegallalang carry mist into mid-morning before it lifts.