Picture Canyon petroglyphs Ceramic Art Tile

A four-mile loop through a sandstone canyon on the Comanche Grassland, almost in Oklahoma. The south walls hold red and black pictographs and the cut figures of animals and people, most of them made by Plains hands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One narrow rock chamber called Crack Cave, kept locked the rest of the year, opens to a beam of sunrise light at the spring and fall equinox; the markings inside read clear for a few minutes. The Forest Service unlocks the gate for those two mornings. Nobody comes out here much. The wind takes most things; what stayed got cut deep.

Slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, in our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.