Silver Springs head spring
— a hole in the floor of Florida, pouring blue.
Not only on a wall.
Silver Springs head spring, 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.
“The head spring is the vent itself: a limestone bowl in the floor of the basin where the Floridan Aquifer comes back out into the sun. Half a billion gallons a day, 72 degrees, every day of the year. The colour at the rim runs a pale clear blue that gets bluer the closer the eye gets to the opening. The cypress lean in around it. Nothing about the surface gives the scale of the room beneath.
The place, in three passes.
The head spring at Silver Springs, known locally as Mammoth Spring, is the largest of more than thirty named vents that together form the source of the Silver River in Marion County, Florida. The U.S. Geological Survey classes Silver Springs as a first-magnitude spring, the highest tier, with mean discharge of roughly 550 million gallons per day. The water emerges from the Ocala Limestone of the Floridan Aquifer, much of it falling as rain in the surrounding Marion and Alachua county recharge basin years to decades earlier.
The head spring vent reaches roughly 40 feet at the bowl and drops further through limestone fissures into the cave system below. The temperature holds at 72 degrees Fahrenheit through every month of the year, a constancy that draws manatees in from the cooler St. Johns River through winter. Historic photographs from the 1880s show clarity to the floor at 80 feet; nutrient loading from agricultural runoff has narrowed that figure since, but the head bowl on a clear morning still reads through to its base.
The head spring sits at the centre of Silver Springs State Park at 5656 East Silver Springs Boulevard, about six miles east of downtown Ocala. The viewing dock and overlook are a short walk from the main parking lot. Swimming directly in the head bowl is not permitted; kayaks and canoes launch from the basin and drift over the vent for the clearest view. The park opens at 8 a.m. and closes at sundown; admission is collected per vehicle at the gate.
