Tanah Lot
— — the silhouette that waits for the sun.
Not only on a wall.
“A small sea temple on a basalt rock off the Tabanan coast, cut off at high tide and walkable at low. Pilgrims come at the end of the afternoon, when the silhouette turns black against an orange sky and the swallows start their pass. Banded sea snakes live in the caves below the shrine. Locals say they guard it. From the studio, a place we know the way you know a postcard a friend kept on the refrigerator for thirty years. from the studio
Tanah Lot, 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.
Tanah Lot sits on a small offshore rock formation in Tabanan Regency on Bali's southwest coast, about 20 kilometres northwest of Kuta. The temple is one of seven sea temples ringing the island, each within sight of the next, that together form a chain of Balinese Hindu shrines facing the Indian Ocean. Tradition credits its founding to the Dang Hyang Nirartha, a Javanese priest who travelled the island in the early sixteenth century and chose this rock as a place of worship.
The temple faces west, which is why almost every photograph of Tanah Lot is a sunset photograph. In the last hour of daylight the rock turns into a hard black cut-out against a sky that runs through orange, rose, and a final deep indigo before the lights along the cliff path come on. The crowd thickens around 5:30 in the dry season and thins almost the moment the sun is down. Photographers wait for the eight or nine minutes after, when the sky still holds colour and the silhouette holds its shape.
The site opens around dawn and closes after sunset; a small admission is collected at the gate, and at low tide visitors can walk across the wet sand to the base of the rock, where a temple priest offers a blessing of holy water from a spring beneath the shrine. Only Balinese Hindus may climb to the temple itself. Banded sea snakes (Laticauda colubrina) live in the caves at the rock's base and are considered guardians of the site. The walk back along the cliff path passes a row of warung stalls selling grilled corn and coconut.