Epoxy

Coquina Beach

Bradenton Beach, Florida, USA

Also known as Anna Maria Island, Bradenton Beach, Longboat Pass, Manatee County

The beach is named for a clam that surfs.

Coquina, Donax variabilis, is a wedge-shaped bivalve about an inch long that lives in the swash zone, the strip of sand each wave runs up and back down. It does not hold position. As a wave arrives it lets go, rides the water up the beach, then puts out a muscular foot and buries itself again before the water pulls back. It can do this between one wave and the next, and it moves up and down the beach through the season, living low in the intertidal zone in summer and higher up in winter.

The shells are why people notice them. They come in reds, oranges, purples, yellows and blues, banded and polished, which is what the name variabilis refers to. On this coast people call them butterfly shells.

Biologists treat them as an indicator species. When beach conditions change, coquina populations register it early.

Details

Feature: Coastline
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: Caribbean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: June 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Coquina Beach map by Keyway

How this one was made

Walnut, and wall to wall. The flood covers the entire face and runs off all four edges, then comes back on the sander.

The lettering is the negative. COQUINA BEACH, the line beneath it, the date and the name above are all left standing at the original surface inside the poured area, so the epoxy goes over them and the sanding brings the tops back as bare walnut. That means the cut has to be clean at full depth, since there is no fill to tidy an edge afterwards.

Then the docks. This is a pass between two barrier islands with marinas along the back side, and the finger piers come through as rows of parallel lines a fraction of a millimetre wide, standing out into the water. Each one is a separate dammed channel, straight, and straight is harder than curved at that width because any wobble reads immediately against its neighbours.

One colour doing the whole board, the water. The heart is the same blue as everything else, engraved rather than filled separately.