Block Island, Rhode Island 3D Wood Map | Laser-Cut Birch Nautical 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.
Block Island in laser-cut Baltic birch, 16 by 20 inches: the pork-chop of land a dozen miles off the Rhode Island coast, ringed by the shoals and deep water that keep it feeling farther away than it is.
The island runs on two harbors and one long habit of independence. Great Salt Pond, opened to the sea by a channel cut in the 1890s, became New Harbor and fills with hundreds of boats on a summer weekend; Old Harbor keeps the ferries and the Victorian hotels. At the southern end, the Mohegan Bluffs drop some 150 feet to the beach, and the Southeast Lighthouse above them had to be moved back from the eroding edge in 1993, all 2,000 tons of it. Roughly half the island is protected open space, which is why the Nature Conservancy famously ranked it among the last great places in the hemisphere.
Each contour is a laser-cut sheet, stacked by hand and engraved, with acrylic glass over the relief and a solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light.
One ferry ride separates island people from everyone else. The crossing is the top two layers of this chart.
The engraving covers Old Harbor and New Harbor, the bluffs and both lights, Sandy Point's long spit, and the rips off the corners. Across the sound sits Narragansett Bay and Newport.
- 16 × 20 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