Manta Ray Kona Big Island Ceramic Art Tile
— — a wing the size of a doorway, turning in the light.
Not only on a wall.
“Two small dive sites off the Kona coast of the Big Island. Manta Village down at Keauhou Bay, Manta Heaven up near the airport. Boats anchor after dark. Lanterns drop on a line and pull plankton up out of the dark water. The reef mantas follow. Wingspans of twelve, fourteen feet. They roll slowly through the cones of light, mouths open, then pass under and come back. Nobody on the boat talks much when the mantas are up close.
Manta Ray Kona Big Island Ceramic Art Tile, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Two night-dive sites on the leeward Kona coast of Hawaii Island, the largest island in the chain at about 4,028 square miles. Manta Village sits off Keauhou Bay below the Sheraton Kona Resort, the hotel formerly known as the Kona Surf, where the aggregation was first noticed in the 1970s. Manta Heaven, also called Garden Eel Cove, sits about a mile south of Keahole-Kona International Airport on the same coast. Both are reached only by boat, mostly from Honokōhau Harbor and Keauhou Bay. The mantas themselves are reef mantas, Mobula alfredi, part of a resident Kona population tracked by the Manta Pacific Research Foundation.
Reef mantas are filter feeders. They swim with their mouths held open and their cephalic fins unfurled, funneling water and zooplankton across the gills. At the Kona dive sites, boats anchor after dark and lower lanterns into the water column. The lights pull plankton up out of the surrounding dark, and the mantas follow. Adult wingspans on the Kona population run roughly ten to fourteen feet across, with a few individuals charted past sixteen. The classic feeding move is the barrel roll, a slow head-over-tail loop through the densest plankton cloud, repeated for as long as the food holds.
The sites are reached only by boat, at night, with a licensed operator out of Honokōhau Harbor or Keauhou Bay. Snorkelers float at the surface around a lit board. Divers settle on the sand at about thirty-five feet around a campfire of dive lights. Conditions are workable in most months, with winter swells the most common reason for cancellation. Touching a manta is prohibited under Hawaii state law, which has protected the species since a 2009 statute banning take or capture. The Manta Pacific Research Foundation identifies every individual by the spot pattern on the belly. The working Kona catalogue holds roughly three hundred mantas.