Monitor Valley big sky
— the sky doing all the talking.
Not only on a wall.
Monitor Valley big sky, 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 long sagebrush basin running north and south for about seventy miles, between the Toquima Range and the Monitor Range. The floor sits near 6,500 feet, and the silence carries. Belmont sits at the southern end, a 19th-century silver town worn down to brick and timber. From the studio it reads as Nevada at its quietest.
The place, in three passes.
Monitor Valley is a graben basin in the Basin and Range province of central Nevada, cradled by the Toquima Range on the west and the Monitor Range on the east. The valley floor sits near 6,500 feet and runs roughly seventy miles north and south across sage steppe in Nye County. Access comes from Nevada State Route 376 in Big Smoky Valley and the graded county roads through Belmont, a silver-era ghost town listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The surrounding ranges fall inside Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.
Air on the valley floor runs dry and thin enough that the distance to the next range reads cleanly. The Toquima crest above the valley climbs past 11,000 feet at Mount Jefferson, where lenticular caps form on most summer afternoons before the wind reaches the basin. Light pollution is effectively absent — the closest meaningful sky dome is Tonopah, fifty miles south. On clear new-moon nights the Milky Way casts a faint shadow on the playa, and the cattle gates ring lightly when the wind picks up after dark.
Belmont marks the inhabited edge of the valley — a permanent population in single digits, with the 1876 brick courthouse still standing above the wash. North of there the road runs most of a day without a town. The Toquima Cave pictographs and the Alta Toquima high-altitude village, occupied above 11,000 feet roughly 1,500 years ago, are the human history the valley keeps. Cattle, pronghorn, and the occasional Bureau of Land Management truck make up most of the rest of the traffic on any given afternoon.
