Block Island Rodman's Hollow
— a glacial bowl the island chose to keep.
Not only on a wall.
Block Island Rodman's Hollow, 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.
“Rodman's Hollow is a deep bowl pressed into the south end of the island by a glacier, kept open by the wind and the salt. Bayberry, shadbush, and low oak run down to the sea. A network of footpaths drops from the rim into the basin and out toward Black Rock. It was the first land the islanders set aside, in 1972, and the start of everything that followed.
The place, in three passes.
Rodman's Hollow is a 230-acre glacial outwash basin on the southwestern end of Block Island, a few miles south of Old Harbor along Cooneymus Road. It sits within the larger Block Island Greenway, the network of conserved land that covers nearly half the island. The basin is the surviving signature of the Wisconsinan glaciation that shaped the island roughly 22,000 years ago, and it opens toward the Atlantic at Black Rock Beach.
The hollow holds one of the last large stands of maritime shrubland on the New England coast, the open heath of bayberry, shadbush, arrowwood, and low huckleberry that once covered much of southern New England. Salt wind keeps the canopy short and the sight-lines long. The Nature Conservancy and the Block Island Conservancy together steward the surrounding Greenway, named one of the Last Great Places by the Conservancy in 1991.
The hollow was the first piece of land the island set aside for conservation, purchased in 1972 by the Block Island Conservancy after a community fundraising effort. That single purchase is widely credited with starting the broader Greenway program, which now protects close to 47% of Block Island. Foot trails drop from the rim to the basin floor and continue south to Black Rock Beach, open year-round with no fee.
