Kalamata olive groves
— the silver underside of a leaf in wind.
Not only on a wall.
Kalamata olive groves, 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.
“Olive country at the foot of the Taygetos. The Kalamon trees run from the city's edge out to the gulf in long, low rows, some of them old enough that the trunks have hollowed and re-grown. Harvest is hand-picking, late autumn into winter, into nets laid under the canopy. The hills smell of bruised leaf and pressed fruit for weeks.
The place, in three passes.
The Kalamon olive is grown across Messinia, the southwestern regional unit of the Peloponnese, on the plain between the Taygetos range and the Messinian Gulf. The variety carries a Protected Designation of Origin in the European Union, registered in 1996, which restricts the Kalamata name to fruit grown and processed in the area. The trees are tall by olive standards, with elongated almond-shaped drupes that turn from green to deep purple-black as they ripen through autumn.
Harvest runs late October into January, depending on elevation and that year's rain. Pickers work by hand or with small combs into nets spread under the canopy; the Kalamon bruises easily and is rarely shaken from the tree. The fruit is brined for months in salt and red wine vinegar before it eats the way the world knows it. Spring blossom comes in May, a brief week when the groves go cream-white and the bees take over.
The plain holds the smell of the work for weeks at a time. Bruised leaf in the picking season, then pressed fruit as the mills run through the night in November and December. The Taygetos rises sharply to the east, peaking at Profitis Ilias above 2,400 metres, and the cold air slides down off the ridges after dark. Most groves are family-held, often three or four generations on the same parcel, the older trees gnarled and hollowed at the trunk.
