Eastern Shore farm fields
— the sky doing most of the work.
Not only on a wall.
Eastern Shore farm fields, 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.
“Flat fields run from the Bay to the Delaware line, corn and soybeans and winter wheat in their seasons. The horizon is nearly all sky. A grain silo, a tractor turning at the edge of a row, a heron lifting from a drainage ditch. The land does not raise its voice.
The place, in three passes.
The Eastern Shore is the Maryland portion of the Delmarva Peninsula, nine counties of coastal-plain farmland between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. Elevation rarely exceeds 50 feet. Agriculture works close to a third of the land, with field corn, soybeans, and winter wheat the dominant rotations, much of the corn feeding the broiler-chicken operations that anchor the lower Shore. The Choptank and Nanticoke rivers drain the flat interior toward the Bay, threading the fields with tidal water all the way inland to Denton and Federalsburg.
The rhythm is row-crop. Field corn goes in from late April; soybeans follow in May and June; winter wheat is drilled after harvest in October and overwinters green. The fields photograph best in late summer, when the corn is tall and the soy still deep, and again in November, when harvested rows leave long stubble lines and migrating snow geese arrive from the Canadian Arctic to feed at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge south of Cambridge.
The horizon is the dominant feature. With no relief above 50 feet, the sky carries two thirds of any view, and an approaching front can be read for an hour before it arrives. A steady Bay breeze keeps summer air moving. In winter the fields hold a thin coastal haze that the low sun turns peach for about twenty minutes before sunset. Sound carries: a tractor three fields over reads as if it were in the next row.
