New Zealand 3D Wood Map | Laser-Cut Birch Depth Chart
How the Water Becomes Wood
A chart is a stack of flat sheets until the water's real soundings tell it what shape to take.
- SurveyReal bathymetric sounding data sets every contour line before a single cut is made.
- CutEach depth band is laser-cut from its own sheet of Baltic birch, up to nine layers deep.
- StainWater layers are stained by hand, reading darker the deeper the water runs.
- StackThe sheets are registered and stacked in sequence, and the bed's true shape rises out of the wood.
- EtchDepths and place names are burned into the grain itself, never printed on it.
- FrameA solid Baltic birch frame and acrylic glass finish the piece, ready to hang.
New Zealand in laser-cut Baltic birch, 24.5 by 31 inches: both islands carved one depth contour per layer, a country where the sea is never more than a couple of hours away.
No point in New Zealand lies much more than seventy-five miles from the coast, and the coastline earns the proximity. Fiordland's drowned valleys, Milford and Doubtful Sounds, cut the southwest into some of the most dramatic meetings of mountain and sea anywhere; the Bay of Islands scatters its subtropical anchorages across the north; the Marlborough Sounds fold a labyrinth of sheltered water into the South Island's top; and Cook Strait runs its famously boisterous ferry crossing between the two. On the chart, the fjords' engraved trenches and the strait's deep gap carve the birch exactly as the ice and sea carved the land.
Contours are laser-cut sheet by sheet, stacked by hand, engraved, and finished behind acrylic glass in a solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light.
Aotearoa, the long white cloud, rendered in long stacked birch.
The engraving spans the Bay of Islands to Bluff: Auckland's gulf, Cook Strait, the Sounds, and Fiordland.
- 24.5 × 31 in
- Solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light
- Acrylic glass front, ready to hang
- Free next-business-day shipping on orders placed by 2 PM EST
- 14-day returns
Live from the water