Sioux Falls
— — the pink stone the river found a way through.
Not only on a wall.
“The Big Sioux River drops over a wide shelf of pink quartzite right in the middle of the city, and the stone is older than almost anything else you can stand next to. Locals walk Falls Park on a lunch hour. The water braids and reforms across ledges that have been there for more than a billion years. The colour of the rock is the thing.
Sioux Falls, 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.
Sioux Falls sits on the eastern plains of South Dakota at roughly 1,460 feet of elevation, where the Big Sioux River drops about 100 feet across a series of pink Sioux Quartzite ledges. The falls are the city's namesake and the centerpiece of the 123-acre Falls Park downtown. Founded in 1856 and now home to more than 200,000 people, Sioux Falls is the largest city in the state and the commercial seat of a region that runs into Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska.
The rock at the falls is Sioux Quartzite, a Precambrian sandstone metamorphosed roughly 1.2 billion years ago. Iron oxide gives it the warm rose colour that reads almost salmon when wet. The stone is hard enough that the river has carved channels rather than smoothing the shelf, and the same quartzite shows up in the old buildings around the park, including the 1889 Queen Bee Mill ruin on the west bank. The colour is what the artwork is built around.
The Big Sioux River runs about 420 miles from northeastern South Dakota down to the Missouri at Sioux City, Iowa. At the falls it averages roughly 7,400 cubic feet per second, with spring melt pushing the flow several times higher and late summer dropping it to a thread across the ledges. The braided drop is not one waterfall but a staircase of small ones, reshaped each season as ice and high water rearrange the rubble beneath.