San Clemente Island
— — the island the Navy kept and the foxes kept too.
Not only on a wall.
“The southernmost of the eight California Channel Islands, a long narrow ridge of basalt and sandstone in the open Pacific west of San Diego. About 35 kilometres long and rising to roughly 600 metres on its eastern escarpment, the island has been owned and managed by the United States Navy since 1934 and used as a training range. It is closed to the public, but the closure has preserved an unusually intact native ecosystem: the endemic San Clemente Island fox, the loggerhead shrike brought back from near-extinction, and a flora of more than four hundred species. — from the studio
San Clemente Island, 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.
San Clemente Island is the southernmost of California's Channel Islands, lying roughly 130 kilometres west of San Diego and 110 kilometres south of Long Beach. The island is about 35 kilometres long and 6 kilometres at its widest, with a high eastern escarpment rising to about 599 metres at Mount Thirst. It is administratively part of Los Angeles County. The Navy has held the island since 1934 and uses it as a training range under Naval Base Coronado; civilian access is not permitted. The island sits at the southern end of the Channel Islands chain, separated from Santa Catalina by the deep San Clemente Basin.
Closed access and a long single-tenant history have left San Clemente with an unusually intact ecosystem. The island is the only home of the endemic San Clemente Island fox, a dwarf subspecies of the island fox weighing under 2 kilograms, recovered from the brink under a long Navy and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service programme. The San Clemente loggerhead shrike, once down to fewer than twenty wild birds in the 1990s, has been pulled back from near-extinction through captive breeding. The island carries more than four hundred plant species, with several endemics, and rings of sea-bird colonies along its undisturbed cliffs.
The island is a tilted block of Miocene volcanic and sedimentary rock, with a long, steep eastern escarpment dropping to a narrow shelf and a gentler western slope of marine terraces stepping down to the Pacific. Sea caves and arches cut the basalt cliffs; the surrounding waters are part of a National Marine Sanctuary boundary and hold extensive kelp forests. Archaeological work along the terraces has recorded continuous use by the Tongva and the earlier Channel Island peoples for at least eight thousand years, with shell middens, hearths and rock features along the coast.