Illinois River
— a slow river that built a state.
Not only on a wall.
“The principal river of Illinois, about 273 miles from its source at the meeting of the Kankakee and Des Plaines rivers near Channahon down to the Mississippi at Grafton. It was the old French portage route between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, the carrying river of Cahokia and Peoria, and now a quiet thread of bluffs, backwater lakes, and shallow river towns. from the studio
Illinois River, 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.
The Illinois River runs about 273 miles across the state of Illinois, from its formation at the confluence of the Kankakee and Des Plaines rivers near Channahon, in Will County, southwest to the Mississippi at Grafton. The drainage basin covers roughly 28,000 square miles, most of the state. The river is part of the Illinois Waterway, a federally maintained barge channel linking Lake Michigan to the Mississippi via the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, with a series of locks and dams operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The lower river runs slow and wide between limestone bluffs, especially through the Starved Rock and Pere Marquette state park stretches, where wooded bluffs rise more than 200 feet above the floodplain. Backwater lakes, oxbows, and bottomland forest line the channel; the Illinois is one of the most important migratory bird corridors in the central United States, with the Emiquon and Chautauqua refuges holding hundreds of thousands of waterfowl in autumn. The water is a working river: barge traffic, fishing skiffs, and Asian carp.
The river's defining season is autumn. The bluff oaks turn from late September into late October, the migratory ducks and geese arrive in waves, and the small river towns hold their fall festivals: Utica, Starved Rock, Grafton. Winter brings the bald eagles, which gather on the open water below the lock-and-dam structures from December into February. Spring is the season of high water and floodplain green-up; summer, of slow heat and shallow backwaters thick with bottomland insect noise.