SPRUCE PINE, N. C. — The mountain, pulverized, ran through my fingers. Mixed with trickling drops of water in the rotating drum, it balled into a crumbled pastry dough. In Spruce Pine, North Carolina, glass batch — that mix of dry ingredients destined to be heated and melted in a glassblower’s furnace — has been produced since 1986. Glass batch was not the hot glass I had learned to manipulate as an ethnographer writing about contemporary studio glassblowing in the mid-2000s but the minerals of its making. From July 2023 to this past August, I conducted six weeks of fieldwork in North Carolina’s Mitchell and Yancey Counties, working at the Spruce Pine Batch Company’s factory, visiting local mines, and delving into county archives. The company, a notable supplier of glass batch to independent and institutional glass studios across the United States, closed on September 27 for what was expected to be a bad storm. Hurricane Helene then poured over 24 inches (~62 cm) of rain on Spruce Pine in a single day. The factory and employees are safe, but a significant supply of glass batch was cut off for a month.
Spruce Pine Batch is not the only silica-based company in northwestern North Carolina to be interrupted by Hurricane Helene. Seated in the Spruce Pine Mining District, a 12-by-25-mile (~19.3-by-40.2-km) area famed for its mica, kaolin, quartz, and feldspar, the batch company neighbors the Quartz Corporation and Sibelco, two international mining conglomerates that supply the world’s semiconductor production with high-purity quartz. The feldspar in the batch that ran through my fingers originated in these mines. In years prior, the silica used by the batch company had also originated there.
The fact that Hurricane Helene halted the supply of Spruce Pine Batch and high-purity quartz is not a geographic coincidence. Instead, it points to the real entwinement of art worlds, the global mining industry, and the deep time of geology. Canonically, though, the story of studio glass is told only from the vantage of biography and objects: The birth of the American Studio Glass movement typically begins with the expressionist blobs produced in the Toledo Workshops of 1962 and ’64 led by Harvey K. Littleton, who went on to incorporate Spruce Pine Batch and is now regarded as the father of studio glass.
Studio glass practitioners — myself included — pride themselves on rejecting industry, embracing individual autonomy, and relocating glass from the factory to the artist’s studio, but the movement’s entwinement with industry 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 massive Hale Telescope at Corning Glass Works (now Corning Incorporated, which runs the Corning Museum of Glass), where Littleton was immersed in everyday life at the factory as a child when his father led its research and development team. The feldspar processing plant, Kona, provided early studio glassblowers at the nearby Penland School of Craft with “fines” — silica sand waste — that melted the most brilliant glass the field had yet seen. The renowned school’s land belongs to a history of prospecting, acquisition, transfer, and negotiated rights to mines and minerals. From the vantage of deep, geological time, the proximity of the batch company and the mines rich in silica and feldspar is an outcome of the fact that humans belong to and participate in the life of stones.
While I was flying over the Spruce Pine Mining District in August with mining geologist Alex Glover and local glassblower Greg Fidler, this geological interdependence was impossible to ignore. From my window seat, the mineral legacy of the district was deeply etched into quarried mountainsides, abandoned processing plants, and reclaimed mines where the land is now dense with forestation. It was Glover’s first bird’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 passed the conjoined Sibelco and Quartz Corporation mines below.
After Hurricane Helene, he recounted the devastation. “The small creeks became rivers, and the rivers became bulldozers wiping out all in their path,” he said, adding that the quartz plants along the rivers had sustained noticeable damage. “It will be years before the roads are back in good shape.”
Damage to private, local, state, and federal roads in the wake of the hurricane also posed problems for the batch company. Tom Littleton, Harvey K. Littleton’s son and current owner of Spruce Pine Batch, told me in an interview that he’s worried about sourcing feldspar, a local by-product of high-purity quartz production and salient glass ingredient.
A regional silica miner told me that a “good day” is defined by a “smooth road” — mining free of ice or soft conditions and hazards like brake failure. The origin of the batch company’s silica supply experienced high winds and heavy rains, but everyday operations were “not impacted” after the storm, the manager told me in an email (the names of the miner and manager are replaced with pseudonyms in my research in accordance with the customs of ethnography). Roads became the primary delivery obstacle; interstate highways had been washed away, buried in landslides, or otherwise compromised. The mine successfully hauled a silica delivery to the batch company a month following the hurricane using “the backroads,” Tom Littleton explained.
Hurricane Helene didn’t just exacerbate the interconnection of the global mineral supply chain and the art worlds — it also highlighted this network’s vulnerability. Notably, for glass production, this web of nodes includes China’s 2024 export restriction on antimony and fluctuations in the lithium market. As Brendan Miller, who oversees glass batch supply at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told me in an email, his team began storing between a semester and a year’s worth of glass material on hand as a precaution due to the precarity of the supply chain. “That has given us about six months to figure things out as problems happen,” he explained. “As for batch, I ordered a year’s worth of glass last spring and will do so again this spring when I get down to having about a semester’s worth of glass on hand.”
Writing this in New York City at my windowside desk lined with silica-eroded steel paddles from the batch company’s mixers given to me by the workers as souvenirs and specimens of quartz, feldspar, mica, and river glass, I know that mines and minerals grip and carry my imagination, my heart, my writing, my glass practice, and perhaps my lungs. Working at the batch company, I shoveled local feldspar into regional silica and other ingredients. Occasionally melting the batch and blowing it at the furnace, I sweated. By day’s end, my hair, eyebrows, ear canals, wells of my pockets, camera, notebook, and every crevice were powder-dusted. The sweat dried into white crystals kindred to the batch itself. Adjourning to the South Toe River after work, I would rinse and swim, noticing shimmering mica flakes intermixed with gleaming schools 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 is not simply a condition of human life; the geological is human life. Art worlds are mining worlds. Hurricane Helene urgently reveals this interconnectedness amid the landscape of climate change.
The interruption of Spruce Pine’s batch supply for American studio glassblowing and high-purity quartz for global semiconductor production poses pragmatic problems: There are orders to be filled and stuff to be made. But so too does it compel those of us in various art worlds to understand ourselves and the ongoing formation of the earth as two sides of one and the same creative process — to interweave the human experience of self-determination with that of the living, and dying, ecological world.
