The batch agglomerator at Spruce Pine Batch Firm (all photographs Erin E. O’Connor/Hyperallergic)
SPRUCE PINE, N. C. — The mountain, pulverized, ran via my fingers. Combined with trickling drops of water within the rotating drum, it balled right into a crumbled pastry dough. In Spruce Pine, North Carolina, glass batch — that blend of dry elements destined to be heated and melted in a glassblower’s furnace — has been produced since 1986. Glass batch was not the recent glass I had realized to govern as an ethnographer writing about modern studio glassblowing within the mid-2000s however the minerals of its making. From July 2023 to this previous August, I carried out six weeks of fieldwork in North Carolina’s Mitchell and Yancey Counties, working on the Spruce Pine Batch Firm’s manufacturing facility, visiting native mines, and delving into county archives. The corporate, a notable provider of glass batch to impartial and institutional glass studios throughout the US, closed on September 27 for what was anticipated to be a nasty storm. Hurricane Helene then poured over 24 inches (~62 cm) of rain on Spruce Pine in a single day. The manufacturing facility and staff are protected, however a big provide of glass batch was lower off for a month.
Spruce Pine Batch shouldn’t be the one silica-based firm in northwestern North Carolina to be interrupted by Hurricane Helene. Seated within the Spruce Pine Mining District, a 12-by-25-mile (~19.3-by-40.2-km) space famed for its mica, kaolin, quartz, and feldspar, the batch firm neighbors the Quartz Company and Sibelco, two worldwide mining conglomerates that offer the world’s semiconductor manufacturing with high-purity quartz. The feldspar within the batch that ran via my fingers originated in these mines. In years prior, the silica utilized by the batch firm had additionally originated there.
Spruce Pine Batch Firm is a notable provider of glass batch to impartial and institutional glass studios throughout the US.
The truth that Hurricane Helene halted the provision of Spruce Pine Batch and high-purity quartz shouldn’t be a geographic coincidence. As an alternative, it factors to the true entwinement of artwork worlds, the worldwide mining trade, and the deep time of geology. Canonically, although, the story of studio glass is informed solely from the vantage of biography and objects: The start of the American Studio Glass motion usually begins with the expressionist blobs produced within the Toledo Workshops of 1962 and ’64 led by Harvey Okay. Littleton, who went on to include Spruce Pine Batch and is now considered the daddy of studio glass.
Studio glass practitioners — myself included — pleasure themselves on rejecting trade, embracing particular person autonomy, and relocating glass from the manufacturing facility to the artist’s studio, however the motion’s entwinement with trade vis-a-vis minerals and mining is deep-seated and far-reaching. In 1934, pure quartz from Spruce Pine’s Chestnut Flats Mine was used to make the lens of the huge Hale Telescope at Corning Glass Works (now Corning Integrated, which runs the Corning Museum of Glass), the place Littleton was immersed in on a regular basis life on the manufacturing facility as a baby when his father led its analysis and growth staff. The feldspar processing plant, Kona, offered early studio glassblowers on the close by Penland College of Craft with “fines” — silica sand waste — that melted probably the most good glass the sphere had but seen. The famend faculty’s land belongs to a historical past of prospecting, acquisition, switch, and negotiated rights to mines and minerals. From the vantage of deep, geological time, the proximity of the batch firm and the mines wealthy in silica and feldspar is an end result of the truth that people belong to and take part within the lifetime of stones.
Whereas I used to be flying over the Spruce Pine Mining District in August with mining geologist Alex Glover and native glassblower Greg Fidler, this geological interdependence was inconceivable to disregard. From my window seat, the mineral legacy of the district was deeply etched into quarried mountainsides, deserted processing vegetation, and reclaimed mines the place the land is now dense with forestation. It was Glover’s first hen’s-eye view of the mines in over a decade. “I could make the argument that this is the most important mine in the world,” he commented as we handed the conjoined Sibelco and Quartz Company mines under.
A view of the Spruce Pine mines in August, earlier than Hurricane Helene hit
After Hurricane Helene, he recounted the devastation. “The small creeks became rivers, and the rivers became bulldozers wiping out all in their path,” he stated, including that the quartz vegetation alongside the rivers had sustained noticeable injury. “It will be years before the roads are back in good shape.”
Injury to personal, native, state, and federal roads within the wake of the hurricane additionally posed issues for the batch firm. Tom Littleton, Harvey Okay. Littleton’s son and present proprietor of Spruce Pine Batch, informed me in an interview that he’s nervous about sourcing feldspar, an area by-product of high-purity quartz manufacturing and salient glass ingredient.
Penning this in New York Metropolis at my windowside desk lined with silica-eroded metal paddles from the batch firm’s mixers given to me by the employees as souvenirs and specimens of quartz, feldspar, mica, and river glass, I do know that mines and minerals grip and carry my creativeness, my coronary heart, my writing, my glass apply, and maybe my lungs. Working on the batch firm, I shoveled native feldspar into regional silica and different elements. Often melting the batch and blowing it on the furnace, I sweated. By day’s finish, my hair, eyebrows, ear canals, wells of my pockets, digicam, pocket book, and each crevice have been powder-dusted. The sweat dried into white crystals kindred to the batch itself. Adjourning to the South Toe River after work, I might rinse and swim, noticing shimmering mica flakes intermixed with gleaming colleges of shiners, darting rainbow trout, and deep-dwelling smallmouth bass. The mineral metabolism of life in Spruce Pine is tangible: silver on silver, sparkle on sparkle, salt on salt, mineral on mineral. The geological shouldn’t be merely a situation of human life; the geological is human life. Artwork worlds are mining worlds. Hurricane Helene urgently reveals this interconnectedness amid the panorama of local weather change.
The interruption of Spruce Pine’s batch provide for American studio glassblowing and high-purity quartz for international semiconductor manufacturing poses pragmatic issues: There are orders to be crammed and stuff to be made. However so too does it compel these of us in numerous artwork worlds to know ourselves and the continuing formation of the earth as two sides of 1 and the identical inventive course of — to interweave the human expertise of self-determination with that of the dwelling, and dying, ecological world.
The Chestnut Flats Exploratory Mine
Shoveling feldspar at Spruce Pine Batch 
Check-pulling blown glass at Spruce Pine Batch
