Seminar The Middle Mineral and the Mine: Alchemy & Art in the Anthropocene

The first silica mine that I visited had “pulled a shot” that morning; workers had dynamited a portion of the mountain, reducing half of the ridge before me to ten tons of rubble. I stood upon an already-cleared section of the mountain from which I could see its bowels: the high-quality silica typically hidden by the lush green, rolling peaks characteristic of the Appalachian region of the United States. The silica was largely destined for glassmaking factories serving the architecture and automotive industries, but some would also be shipped to glassmakers serving the contemporary art world of studio glass.

In this talk, The Middle Mineral and the Mine: A Geoanthropology of Studio Glass, sociologist and experienced glassblower and glassmaker, Erin O’Connor, pivots from the furnaces of glassblowing to the mines of glassmaking, revealing the inseparability of human creativity, geology, and geopolitics. This work returns to the debated status of glass as a “middle mineral”—a substance that, according to Renaissance alchemists, lies between the natural and the artificial. By revealing the vibrant materiality and deep time of glassmaking, glass—neither nature nor culture, but nature-culture—is the quintessential medium of both yesterday’s modernity and tomorrow’s futurity.