Laysan
— an island the birds keep.
Not only on a wall.
“A low coral and sand island in the far Northwest Hawaiian chain, about nine hundred miles from Honolulu, with a shallow hypersaline lake at its center. Laysan is closed to the public. It belongs to the seabirds. Laysan and black-footed albatross arrive by the hundreds of thousands each winter, and the Laysan duck exists nowhere else on earth.
Laysan, 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.
Laysan lies in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, about 930 miles northwest of Honolulu, inside Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. The island is a single low platform of coral sand, roughly two miles long and one mile wide, with a maximum elevation around forty feet. At its center sits a hypersaline lake, one of only five natural hypersaline lakes in the United States. The whole island is part of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and access is restricted to permitted researchers and resource managers.
There are no roads, no buildings beyond a small field camp, no permanent human residents. The daily traffic is biological: hundreds of thousands of Laysan and black-footed albatross return each winter to nest, Hawaiian monk seals haul out along the beaches, and the endemic Laysan duck and Laysan finch live nowhere else on earth. Introduced rabbits stripped Laysan to bare sand by the early 1920s; after their eradication in 1923, the vegetation and seabird populations recovered slowly across the rest of the twentieth century.
The lake at the center of Laysan is about three times saltier than the surrounding Pacific, with no outlet to the sea. Its level rises and falls with rainfall and evaporation, and its margins are fringed with sedges and the Laysan duck's main feeding ground: dense clouds of brine flies along the shore. The lake is fed entirely by groundwater and rain; salinity has been measured at roughly 90 to 100 parts per thousand against the open ocean's 35, placing it among the saltiest natural water bodies in the United States.