Hooper Island watermen
— a morning the water hands back.
Not only on a wall.
Hooper Island watermen, 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.
“A thin chain of islands trailing south from the Eastern Shore into the Chesapeake, with Hoopersville at the southern tip. The watermen work crab in summer and oyster in winter, running deadrise boats out of the docks at first light. The houses sit low to the marsh, foundations slowly conceding to the rising bay. Honga River on one side, Tangier Sound on the other, and not much else between. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Hooper Island is a chain of three low islands — Upper, Middle, and Lower Hooper — strung along the western edge of Dorchester County, Maryland, between the Honga River and Tangier Sound. The community of Hoopersville sits near the southern tip. The islands lie roughly 30 miles southwest of Cambridge by road, reached by Maryland Route 335. Most ground sits within a few feet of mean sea level, and large stretches of Lower Hooper have washed away within living memory. Old St. Mary's Star of the Sea Catholic Church has anchored the chain since 1872.
Working watermen here run Chesapeake Bay deadrise boats, a wooden V-bottom hull form built locally in the early twentieth century for shallow bay work. The summer fishery is blue crab, scraped or potted in the eelgrass beds of Tangier Sound. From November into March, oysters are tonged and dredged from the public bars under Maryland's seasonal rules. The Phillips Wharf Environmental Center, founded in 2006 in Tilghman and later relocated to Hoopersville, documents the fishery and runs hatchery work to replant native oyster spat onto the surrounding bars.
The waterman's calendar is set by the bay. Maryland's recreational crab season runs roughly April through mid-December; commercial scraping and potting follow similar dates with stricter sizing. The public oyster season opens October first and closes near the end of March, divided between hand-tonging and power dredge days by area. Soft-shell crab work, the most delicate part of the year, runs from May into July. By late summer the marsh grass turns the Honga to brass-green, and the houses at Hoopersville run their lights against an early dusk.
