Swains Island
— — one ring of palms, one inner pond.
Not only on a wall.
“A coral ring about 350 kilometres north of the Tokelau atolls and roughly the same distance south of the Samoan islands, with a closed lagoon at its centre and a fringe of coconut palms around the edge. The island is rarely visited; supply boats call only a few times a year. The reef holds the colour the open Pacific does, that very pure middle blue.
Swains 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.
Swains Island is a small coral atoll in the central Pacific, roughly 1.5 square kilometres of land enclosing a closed brackish lagoon. It sits about 350 kilometres north of the Tokelau atolls and is geographically part of the Tokelau chain, though under American administration it is grouped with American Samoa following an agreement in 1925. The atoll has been associated with the Jennings family since the mid-nineteenth century, when Eli Jennings settled there and established a coconut plantation. Tokelau continues to assert its claim on the island in international forums.
The island has no airstrip and no scheduled passenger access; small boats reach it occasionally from American Samoa, roughly 350 kilometres to the south, when weather and crew allow. The resident population has been very small for decades and has often dropped to zero between visits. The lagoon is closed off from the open ocean by a continuous reef and has turned brackish over time, holding fish populations adapted to that specific water chemistry. Nights on the atoll are dark and quiet, with no permanent lights and no ambient noise above the surf.
The reef around Swains is unbroken, which separates the inner lagoon from open ocean and gives the water of the lagoon a deeper, stiller colour than the reef flats outside. The outer reef drops off quickly into deep water; the surrounding ocean is part of one of the least surveyed reaches of the central Pacific, with no nearby commercial shipping lane. Coral cover on the outer reef remains relatively intact compared with more visited atolls in the region, in part because the island sees so few boats.