New Guinea
— — rainforest under a four-thousand-metre spine.
Not only on a wall.
“The Indonesian half of New Guinea, west of the border that splits the island roughly down the middle. The Maoke range carries the only equatorial glaciers in Asia, on Puncak Jaya at 4,884 metres. Below them the rainforest runs unbroken for hundreds of kilometres. The Baliem Valley holds villages the outside world did not map until 1938.
New Guinea, 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.
Western New Guinea covers the Indonesian half of the world's second-largest island, about 420,000 square kilometres divided across six provinces. The Maoke mountains run east to west and rise to Puncak Jaya at 4,884 metres, the highest peak between the Himalayas and the Andes. Lorentz National Park, on the southern slope, is a UNESCO site of 25,000 square kilometres that runs from snowfields to mangrove coast. The region holds roughly 5.4 million people, the great majority of them Melanesian, speaking more than 250 distinct languages.
The lowlands run hot and wet year-round, with annual rainfall above four metres in many places. The Maoke range pulls the weather upward and cools it quickly: by 3,000 metres the air is alpine, and the small remaining glaciers near the summit of Puncak Jaya are the only ones in the tropics outside the Andes and East Africa. The Baliem Valley, at about 1,600 metres, sits in a microclimate of clear mornings and afternoon cloud, with the temperature gentle enough for sweet potato fields that have been worked for centuries.
The Baliem Valley was not mapped by outsiders until the American zoologist Richard Archbold flew over it in June 1938 and saw a cultivated landscape no one outside knew existed. The Dani, Lani, and Yali peoples have farmed sweet potato in irrigated fields here for thousands of years. The valley remains hard to reach: the only road from the coast is the long flight into Wamena. Lorentz National Park has no roads at all, and most of the lowland forest west of the range can only be entered on foot or by river.