Waianapanapa Black Sand Maui Ceramic Art Tile
— the colour the lava left behind.
Not only on a wall.
“Mile marker 32 on the Hāna Highway, on the windward coast of Maui. The sand here is basalt, volcanic rock the Pacific has been grinding down for centuries. The Hawaiian name means glistening water, a reference to the freshwater caves at the head of the beach where Princess Popoalaea is said to have hidden from her husband. Hala trees lean toward the surf. The state park requires a reservation now, since 2021, and most days the shore is quieter for it.
Waianapanapa Black Sand Maui 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.
Waiʻānapanapa State Park sits on the windward coast of Maui, along the Hāna Highway at mile marker 32, just before the town of Hāna. The 122-acre park preserves a stretch of low basalt sea cliff, freshwater caves, and Pāʻiloa Beach, the small black-sand pocket at its centre [1]. The land remains culturally significant to Native Hawaiians. Within the park boundaries are the remains of ʻOhala Heiau, an ancient temple platform, and a section of the Kīpapa o Kihapiʻilani Trail, the coastal stone path attributed to the 16th-century Maui chief Kihapiʻilani [2]. The state park is administered by the Hawaiʻi Division of State Parks under the Department of Land and Natural Resources.
The sand of Pāʻiloa Beach is basalt, volcanic rock broken down by wave action rather than the long mineral weathering that produces the tan and white sands of older shores. Maui's eastern coast was built by the shield volcanism of Haleakalā, whose last eruption is now dated by the U.S. Geological Survey to between 1480 and 1600 [1]. As lava cliffs meet the Pacific, the sea grinds basalt into pebbles, then into the coarse black grains underfoot, and the fragments retain the colour of the parent rock. Across the Hawaiian Islands, only a handful of beaches sit at the right combination of recent lava flow and ocean exposure for this to occur. Punaluʻu on Hawaiʻi Island is the other most-photographed example [2]. The grains are heavier than quartz sand and warm quickly in the sun.
The park takes its name from the freshwater caves at the head of Pāʻiloa Beach. Waiʻānapanapa translates loosely as 'glistening water,' a reference to the pools at the back of two lava-tube caves that catch and throw light through narrow openings overhead [1]. On certain nights the water takes on a red cast. Hawaiian oral tradition attributes the colour to Princess Popoalaea, said to have hidden in the caves from her cruel husband Chief Kaʻakea and to have been found and killed there [2]. The natural explanation is the seasonal hatch of ʻōpaeʻula, the small red endemic shrimp that live in anchialine pools across the Hawaiian Islands [1]. Visitors are asked not to enter the caves out of respect; the pools remain culturally significant to Native Hawaiians.