St. Matthew Island
— — a place the map keeps and almost no one visits.
Not only on a wall.
“An uninhabited island in the central Bering Sea, about 200 miles from the nearest shore. No harbour, no village, no airstrip. The island has weather for most of the year and a short summer when seabirds nest on the basalt cliffs and a small endemic vole comes out into the tundra grass. A handful of biologists land by boat in July. Nobody stays the winter.
St. Matthew 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.
St. Matthew Island lies in the central Bering Sea, roughly 200 miles from the nearest land and about 300 miles west of mainland Alaska. The island is about 51 kilometres long, has no permanent residents, and forms part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. It was charted in 1766 by the Russian navigator Ivan Synd and named for the apostle Matthew. Basalt sea cliffs rise on the north coast above a treeless interior of tundra, freshwater ponds and low ridges, ringed in summer by enormous seabird colonies.
The island has no harbour and no airstrip. Researchers reach it by ship from St. Paul or Nome — a two-day passage in good weather and longer in bad. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service runs short summer expeditions to count seabirds and study the singing vole found nowhere else on earth. Outside those few weeks the island goes back to wind, fog and the long subarctic dark. No commercial traffic calls, and the surrounding waters are open to weather from three directions at once.
There are roughly six usable weeks. By late June the snow has melted off the slopes and the puffins, murres and kittiwakes have settled on the cliffs in the hundreds of thousands. By mid-August the storms return. The reindeer the Coast Guard introduced in 1944 are gone — a herd that grew to nearly six thousand by 1963 and crashed by 1966, the textbook case in population biology. Polar bears occasionally drift in on the winter ice. Foxes are now the resident mammal.