From Furnace to Mine: An Ethnomineralogy of the Early Studio-Glass Movement

Abstract

Drawing on four weeks of fieldwork in 2023 at a glassmaking facility and at mines in the southeastern Appalachian region of the United States, this article asks how batchmaking (the mixing of the raw ingredients of glass) figured into early American studio glassblow ing. In the 1960s and 1970s batchmaking materials were salvaged from both industrial glassmaking sites and mines, a practice that became increasingly obsolete as ready-made batch became available in the mid-1980s. This article draws from new materialism and critical Indigenous theory to explore a “symgeologic” account of becoming a glassblower and to critique persistent Cartesian-Newtonian tenets of studio-glass history. As an ethnomineralogy, this chapter asks: How are minerals alternatively “laid to waste” and recouped in the knowledge of glassmaking? How is the knowledge of batchmaking itself “laid to waste”? How do minerals, mines, and glassblowers co-become? What are the sym geological origins of studio glass and the stories thereof?