SPRUCE PINE, N.C. — The mountain, pulverized, flowed through my fingers. Mixed with drops of water flowing into the rotating drum, it turns into crumbled puff pastry. In Spruce Pine, North Carolina, batch glass — that mixture of dry ingredients meant to be heated and melted in a glassblower’s furnace — has been produced since 1986. Batch glass was not the hot glass that I had learned to handle as an ethnographer. while writing on contemporary glassblowing in the studio in the mid-2000s but on the minerals of its manufacture. From July 2023 to last August, I conducted six weeks of fieldwork in Mitchell and Yancey counties in North Carolina, working at the Spruce Pine Batch Company plant, visiting local mines, and digging into the county records. The company, a notable supplier of glass lots to independent and institutional glass studios across the United States, closed its doors on September 27 due to what was expected to be a severe storm. Hurricane Helene then dumped more than 24 inches (~62 cm) of rain on Spruce Pine in a single day. The factory and employees are safe, but a large supply of the batch of glass was cut for a month.

Spruce Pine Batch is not the only silica-based business in northwest North Carolina to be disrupted by Hurricane Helene. Sitting in the Spruce Pine Mining Districta 12 x 25 mile (~19.3 x 40.2 km) area famous for its mica, kaolin, quartz and feldspar, the batch company neighbors Quartz Corporation and Sibelco, two international mining conglomerates that supply global industry. production of semiconductors with high purity quartz. The feldspar in the batch that flowed through my fingers came from these mines. In previous years, the silica used by the batch manufacturing company also came from there.

The fact that Hurricane Helene interrupted the supply of spruce pine batches and high purity quartz is not a geographical coincidence. Instead, it highlights the real intertwining of the worlds of art, the global mining industry, and deep times of geology. Canonically, however, the history of studio glass is told purely from the perspective of biography and objects: The birth of the American Studio Glass movement generally began with the expressionist blobs produced in the Toledo workshops from 1962 and 64 directed by Harvey K. Littleton, who later incorporated Spruce Pine Batch and is now considered the father of studio glass.

Practitioners of studio glass – myself included – pride themselves on rejecting industry, embracing individual autonomy, and moving glass from the factory to the artist’s studio, but the movement’s connection to The minerals and mining industry is deep-rooted and far-reaching. . In 1934, pure quartz from Spruce Pine’s Chestnut Flats mine was used to make the massif’s lens Hale Telescope at Corning Glass Works (now Corning Incorporated, which manages the Corning Museum of Glass), where Littleton was immersed in daily factory life as a child when his father headed the research and development team. The Kona Feldspar Processing Plant provided early glassblowers at the nearby Penland Craft School with “fines” – waste silica sand – which melted the finest glass. brilliant as the field has ever seen. The land of the famous school is part of a history of prospecting, acquisition, transfer and negotiated rights to mines and minerals. From a deep geological time perspective, the proximity of the batch processing company to the silica and feldspar-rich mines is the result of humans owning and participating in the life of the stones.

While flying over the Spruce Pine mining district in August with a mining geologist Alex Glover and local glassblower Greg Fidler, this geological interdependence was impossible to ignore. From my window, the district’s mineral heritage was etched deep into the logged mountain sides, abandoned processing plants and reclaimed mines where the land is now dense with forests. It was Glover’s first overview of the mines in more than a decade. “I could make the argument that this is the most important mine in the world,” he commented as we passed the joint mines of Sibelco and Quartz Corporation.

After Hurricane Helene, he recounted the devastation. “Small streams became rivers, and rivers became bulldozers wiping out everything in their path,” he said, adding that quartz factories along the rivers suffered notable damage. “It will be years before the roads are in good condition again. »

Damage to private, local, state and federal roads as a result of the hurricane also posed problems for the company in batches. Tom Littleton, the son of Harvey K. Littleton and current owner of Spruce Pine Batch, told me in an interview that he was concerned about the supply of feldspar, a local byproduct of high-grade quartz production. purity and an important glass ingredient.

A regional silica miner told me that a “good day” is defined by a “smooth road” – mining without ice or soft conditions and without hazards like brake failure. The batch company’s silica supply source experienced high winds and heavy rain, but daily operations were “not affected” after the storm, the manager told me in an e-mail (the names of the miner and the director are replaced by pseudonyms in my research in accordance with the practices of ethnography). Roads have become the main obstacle to delivery; interstate highways had been washed out, buried by landslides, or otherwise compromised. The mine successfully transported a shipment of silica to the batch processing company a month after the hurricane using “the back roads,” Tom Littleton said.

Hurricane Helen not only exacerbated the interconnectedness of the global mineral supply chain and the art world, it also exposed the vulnerability of this network. In particular, for glass production, this network of nodes includes the Chinese 2024 project export restriction on antimony and fluctuations in the lithium market. As Brendan Miller, who oversees the supply of glass batches at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told me in an email, his team began stockpiling between a semester and a year’s worth of glass on hand as a precaution in due to the precariousness of the supply chain. “That gave us about six months to sort things out when problems arise,” he said. “As for the lot, I ordered a year’s worth of glass last spring and will do so again this spring when I have about a semester’s worth of glass on hand.”

Writing this in New York, at my desk by the window, lined with steel paddles eroded by silica from the batch company’s mixers, given by workers as souvenirs, and samples of quartz, feldspar, mica and river glass, I know mines and minerals stick together. and carry my imagination, my heart, my writing, my glass practice and perhaps my lungs. Working in the batch manufacturing company, I processed local feldspar into regional silica and other ingredients. Occasionally, while melting the batch and blasting it in the oven, I would sweat. By the end of the day, my hair, eyebrows, ear canals, pockets, camera, notebook and every crevice were powdered. The sweat dried into white crystals akin to the batch itself. Stopping at the South Toe River after work, I rinsed off and swam, noticing shimmering mica flakes mixed with bright schools of shiners, searing rainbow trout, and deep-sea smallmouth bass . The mineral metabolism of life in spruce pine is tangible: silver on silver, shine on shine, salt on salt, mineral on mineral. The geological is not simply a condition of human life; the geological is human life. Art worlds are mining worlds. Hurricane Helen urgently reveals this interdependence in the climate change landscape.

The interruption of Spruce Pine’s supply of batches for US studio glassblowing and high-purity quartz for global semiconductor production poses pragmatic problems: there are orders to fill and things to manufacture. But it also requires those of us who work in diverse artistic worlds to understand ourselves and the continuing formation of the earth as two sides of a single creative process – to interweave the human experience of self-determination with that of the living, and a dying ecological world.