Helmand River
— — a river that ends in a lake of reeds.
Not only on a wall.
“The Helmand rises in the Hindu Kush and runs more than a thousand kilometres south and west before it ends, not at sea, but in the shallow basin of Sistan, where it spreads into the Hamun wetlands on the Iran-Afghanistan border. In wet years the reeds run blue. In dry years the bed cracks and the wind takes the dust.
Helmand River, 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.
The Helmand is the longest river in Afghanistan, rising in the Hindu Kush west of Kabul and flowing roughly 1,150 kilometres southwest into the Sistan Basin. Its terminus is the Hamun-i-Helmand, a system of shallow lakes and reed marshes straddling the border with Iran's Sistan and Baluchestan province. Historically the wetlands covered as much as 4,000 square kilometres in flood years. The Kajaki Dam, completed in 1953 upstream in Afghan Helmand province, regulates much of the flow. Drought and upstream withdrawals have reduced the Iranian Hamuns repeatedly since the 1990s.
In a good water year the Hamun is one of the largest freshwater wetlands in Iran, fed by the spring snowmelt of the Hindu Kush arriving at the border in March and April. Flamingos, pelicans, and migratory waterfowl stop here on the African-Eurasian flyway, and the Sistani people have fished and reeded the marshes for at least four millennia. The water is rarely deeper than three metres. By late summer, evaporation and irrigation withdrawals leave wide salt pans, and the reedbeds retreat to the deepest channels near the Iranian towns of Zabol and Zahak.
Sistan is one of the windiest inhabited places on earth. The Bad-e Sad-o-Bist-Ruz, the Wind of 120 Days, blows from late May through September across the Hamun basin at speeds that strip the surface of any standing water and lift dust into the sky over Zabol. Outside the wind season, the basin is held — flat horizon, low reeds, the call of waterfowl carrying across kilometres. Zabol and Zahedan are the nearest population centres in Iranian Sistan. The Afghan border lies twenty kilometres west of the deepest part of the lake.