saving surfboards from the landfill.
Tombstone Surfboards believes a board’s final resting place should be on a wall, not in the garbage.
Tombstone Surfboards hopes to offer a viable alternative for worn or broken surfboards, by turning them into a unique, eye-catching, centerpiece for your home. We take old surfboards, remove the fiberglass and hand-carve topographic and bathymetric reliefs of any location into the exposed foam. The piece is then finished with USDA certified bio-based Ecopoxy. Each board is completely one-of-a-kind and can be made to order.
Kat Hicks ( GATO )
Owner and artist behind Tombstone Surfboards.
Though she is an East Coast-based artist, it was while living in Northern California that she became immersed in the art and culture of surfboard shaping. It was here, amongst the redwoods and cedar trees, she first began to consider the toll of the surfboard shaping process on the environment, as well as what happens to a board when it is no longer useable. After a few years of shaping and working alongside some incredibly talented shapers, Kat was able to approach these questions through the lens of both a shaper and an artist. It began slowly, using scraps from the shaping bay to sculpt small artworks, eventually expanding to using entire boards to sculpt large-scale, highly detailed, bathymetric maps of varying coastlines and bodies of water.
What lies beneath?
Each Tombstone is a relic, a monument to the memories contained beneath the fiberglass.
Tombstones are carved to depict the coastline and the ocean floor, revealing the hidden elements that led to the creation of those memories. These depictions, while hand-carved, are as a precise and detailed as possible to capture the ocean floor and all it’s hidden mysteries. The coastline, the bathymetry of the ocean floor, these are unseen elements of surfing. As surfers, we sometimes only consider the wave as it moves beneath our feet, forgetting the incredible journey it took to get to us. Over miles and miles of ocean, spanning canyons, over volcanoes and mountains, through underwater rivers and reef beds, that wave made its way to us. Each Tombstone’s aim is to remind us of our place and impact in this system, and on this planet. The wave doesn’t exist apart from the ocean, the ocean and all of its unseen cracks and crevices are apart of that wave beneath us.