Tabar Island
— — the islands the carvings come home to.
Not only on a wall.
“Three volcanic islands northeast of New Ireland — Simberi, Tatau, Tabar — the country the malangan tradition calls home. The ceremonial carvings made here are unveiled once, then released; many were carried into European museums in the early twentieth century. The reef is shallow, the bush dense, the boats few. From the studio, the place reads as a green line on a slow sea.
Tabar Island, 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 Tabar Group lies about thirty kilometres off the northeast coast of New Ireland, the long thin province in the northern reach of the Bismarck Archipelago. Three principal islands — Simberi to the north, Tatau in the middle, Tabar to the south — together cover roughly 250 square kilometres of volcanic forest. Administration runs from Kavieng, the provincial capital. Simberi has an open-pit gold mine; the southern islands remain villages, gardens, and reef. The Pacific here is the Bismarck Sea, warm and shallow against the outer reef.
The islands are the cultural home of malangan, a ceremonial cycle of carved figures made for the dead and shown once before being retired or sold. Anthropologists have catalogued the practice since the late nineteenth century; pieces collected then sit in Berlin, Basel, and the British Museum. The carvings are short-lived by design — made for a single rite, never meant to last. Each generation carves again. The cycle is the point. What stays on Tabar is the knowledge of how to make them.
The reef around Tatau and Tabar is shallow and broken, the sort of water small outrigger canoes have read for centuries. The Bismarck Sea between New Ireland and the Tabar Group runs warm through the year, with surface temperatures usually above twenty-seven degrees Celsius. Tidal range is modest; the channel between the islands carries the trade. Coral cover has thinned in places from bleaching events documented across the western Pacific, though the outer slopes still hold. Access to the islands is by small boat from Kavieng, weather permitting.