New Ireland
— — a long thin island the road follows end to end.
Not only on a wall.
“A long, narrow island in the Bismarck Archipelago, about 340 kilometres from Kavieng in the north down to the limestone coast near Namatanai. The Boluminski Highway, a coastal road begun by a German administrator in 1910, runs most of its length under coconut palms. The Tigak and Kuanua peoples carve malagan funerary figures here, and the shark callers of Kontu still go out at dawn.
New Ireland, 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.
New Ireland is a province of Papua New Guinea and one of the long, slender islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, lying northeast of New Britain across St George's Channel. The island runs about 340 kilometres from the provincial capital Kavieng in the north to the volcanic Hans Meyer Range in the south. The population in the 2011 national census was around 194,000. The coastal Boluminski Highway, begun in 1910 by German administrator Franz Boluminski, follows the eastern shore through villages of stilted houses, copra sheds, and small Lutheran and Catholic churches.
The Bismarck Sea on the west and the Pacific on the east give New Ireland two coasts with very different waters. In the village of Kontu on the west coast, fishermen still practise shark calling, rattling a hollow coconut-shell underwater at dawn to summon a shark close enough to noose by hand. The custom belongs to a handful of men in their fifties and sixties and is no longer routinely passed on. Writer Thomas Bass spent a season at Kontu documenting it in the 1990s.
The malagan tradition, centred on northern New Ireland around the Tabar Islands and the Lelet plateau, produces elaborate painted funerary figures used in the weeks of ceremonies that close a death. After the rite the figures are often left to decay or burned, since the spirit work is done. Museums in Berlin, Basel, and New York hold malagan works collected before 1914 by German ethnographers. The carving is still made today in villages around Libba and on the Tabar Islands, where the language for it has its deepest roots.