Perm
— — the river that points east into Asia.
Not only on a wall.
“A working city of a million people on the Kama River, sitting at the western foot of the Urals where European Russia hands the country over to Siberia. Perm built its name on copper, salt, and the long trains that still cross the river by night. The studio reads it as a place that has always been a threshold, more interesting for what it opens onto than for any single skyline. — from the studio
Perm, 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.
Perm is the administrative centre of Perm Krai, sitting on the Kama River at the western foot of the Ural Mountains, about 1,150 km east of Moscow. It is one of fifteen Russian cities with a population above one million; the 2021 census recorded roughly 1.03 million residents. The Kama, a major tributary of the Volga, runs through the centre and freezes solid from November to April. Vasily Tatishchev founded the city in 1723 around a copper smelter on the Yegoshikha stream.
The Kama is the longest left-bank tributary of the Volga, running about 1,805 km from its source in the Udmurt hills to the Kuybyshev Reservoir. At Perm it is roughly 1.2 km wide, and the river has been navigable here since the 18th-century copper trade. The Kama Hydroelectric Station, completed in 1954, sits on the northern edge of the city and creates a reservoir that fills the river valley back almost to Berezniki. Ice breakers keep the channel open into mid-November in most years.
Perm has long traded on a cultural reputation larger than its industrial outline suggests. Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, spent his childhood here in the family house that is now a museum; the Diaghilev Festival runs in late spring and pulls dancers from across Europe. The Perm-36 site, about 100 km east, is the only preserved Soviet-era forced-labour camp in Russia and operates as a memorial museum. Winters are long and dry, with January averages around minus 14°C and daylight under seven hours.