Dragon Springs
— — a clearing kept very still on purpose.
Not only on a wall.
“Dragon Springs sits on a wooded ridge above the Neversink valley, an hour and a half north of New York City. The grounds belong to a private religious community that arrived in the late nineties and built temples, schools, and a performing-arts campus among the hemlocks. From the public road only the long driveway and a glimpse of tiled roof give it away. — from the studio
Dragon Springs, 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.
Dragon Springs is a private religious and educational campus in the Town of Deerpark, Orange County, in the southern Catskill foothills of New York State. The site lies between Port Jervis and Cuddebackville, roughly 110 kilometres northwest of Manhattan, on rolling forested land that drains south to the Neversink River. The campus was assembled from former farm and woodland parcels beginning in the late 1990s. Its main occupants are religious orders affiliated with Falun Gong, the Fei Tian schools, and the Shen Yun Performing Arts company, which keeps its rehearsal and production facilities here.
The surrounding country is quiet by New York standards. The Town of Deerpark holds fewer than ten thousand residents across more than two hundred square kilometres of woods, farms, and the long ridge of the Shawangunks rising to the east. The Delaware River cuts the western edge of the township, and the Neversink joins it at Port Jervis a few miles south. The campus itself is closed to the public, ringed by a perimeter fence and screening pines, so the impression from the road is of forest and a long, uneventful driveway.
The site itself is not open to visitors. The compound's gates are staffed, and the public road that fronts it has no pull-off or viewing point. What is open is everything around it: the Delaware Water Gap to the south, the Bashakill Wildlife Management Area to the northeast, and the Neversink River corridor for fly fishing. The nearest village with services is Cuddebackville, a quiet hamlet on US Route 209. Travellers come for the country, not the campus, and the campus is content to be left out of frame.