Wild Horse Mesa
— the sage that holds the wind.
Not only on a wall.
Wild Horse Mesa, 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 flat-topped mesa on the high country between Taos and the Colorado line, where the Sangre de Cristos taper into the Rio Grande gorge. Wild horses still cross the sage in small bands. The light here works in long bars, broken by juniper and the long shadow of the rim. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Wild Horse Mesa sits on the high plateau that fans north from Taos toward the Colorado border, a country of sagebrush, juniper, and basalt rim where the Sangre de Cristo range meets the Taos Plateau volcanic field. The Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, designated in 2013, protects roughly 242,500 acres of this terrain, including the deep gorge cut by the Rio Grande below. Wild horse bands still move across the open range. The mesa rim averages near 7,500 feet, and afternoon weather often comes in fast off the mountains to the east.
At 7,500 feet the air on the mesa is dry and thin, scented with sage after a quick monsoon shower. Summer storms build off the Sangre de Cristos most July and August afternoons, then move east across the plateau in less than an hour. Winter mornings can hold sub-zero air against the rim before the sun reaches it. The wind is the constant. It bends the chamisa, lifts dust off the basalt, and carries the call of a red-tailed hawk a long way before it fades into the gorge below.
There are no towns on the mesa. The nearest paved road is NM 522 running north toward Questa and the Colorado line, and beyond that the dirt tracks belong to ranchers and the Bureau of Land Management. A pickup passes maybe once an hour. The silence is not absence; it is structured by distance, by the small dry sounds of grass and stone, and by the wind moving over open ground. Most visitors who come for the wild horses stay only a half day and meet no one on the way out.
