Erin O’Connor

Dr. Erin E. O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Politics and Human Rights at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. She is the author of Fire Craft: Art, Body, and World among Glassblowers (Columbia University Press, 2025). Told from O’Connor’s first-hand experience of learning to blow glass in a glassblowing studio, Fire Craft is a sensuous ethnography of bodily knowledge, materiality, and the formation of self and community. She is renowned within the international community for her ground-breaking studies of glassblowing. As a recipient of the 2023 Rakow Grant for Glass Research, Dr. O’Connor launched her second book project, The Middle Mineral & the Mine: an Ethnogeology of Studio Glass, an investigation of the reciprocity of human creativity and geology in the material life of studio glass. This research has been supported by both a 2025 and a 2024 Marymount Manhattan College Faculty Scholarship Award. As a well-versed interdisciplinary researcher, she also contributes to the College’s programs in Environmental Studies and Art. Her research specializes in glass, the arts, culture, the body, knowledge, and the environment. 

I am an ethnographer in the field of sociology and a maker by many methods. Through practice, I aim to comprehend the human experience of making, its significance, and the socio-political structures and materiality that afford it. I knew I had met a lasting match for my practice-theory approach to understanding when I encountered studio glassblowing. Amidst its molten material, furnace fires, fragile union with the breath, collaborative teamwork, and history variously entwined with empire, small workshops, and industrialization, I found a method of making-knowing and knowing-making.

Launched by a 2023 Rakow Grant for Glass Research, my current project, The Middle Mineral & the Mine: A Geoanthropology of Studio Glass, investigates the reciprocity of human creativity and geology in studio glass. Specifically, I map the relations among glassmaking, mining, minerals, and the deep time of geology to show how glassblowers and geology co-become. How, that is, humans are symgeologic. Given today’s environmental demands amidst global disparity and legacies of colonialism, this project seeks to shift studio glass toward symgeologic sustainability.

My current research emerged from my first book, Fire Craft: Art, Body, and World Among Glassblowers (Columbia University Press, 2025), which interweaves an immersive, firsthand account of my experiences learning to blow glass with a sensuous ethnography of embodiment and community among glassblowers. The Middle Mineral and the Mine builds upon the theoretical progression in Fire Craft from phenomenology to new materialism to critically engage the origins of the art’s molten, viscous medium – that dry mineral mix of the ingredients of glass known as “batch”.

My hands-on research and theoretical versatility shape my academic career. As an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Politics and Human Rights at Marymount Manhattan College, I am also affiliated with the Departments of Environmental Studies and Art.

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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While the GEEX team has closely reviewed and corrected the transcription, it may still contain errors. Please direct any questions or comments to [email protected].

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Transcript

ERIN O’CONNOR:

Hello GEEX! Thank you for inviting me to speak at the 2026 season of GEEX Shorts. My name is Erin O’Connor. I’m an associate professor of sociology at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, where I’m the chair of the department of politics and human rights, an affiliated faculty member of environmental studies, and my courses contribute to the BFA in Art. My research interests are in the sociology of art, environment, culture, body, and knowledge, specifically as pertains to studio glass.

EMILY LEACH (VOICEOVER):

GEEX, the Glass Education Exchange, welcomes Erin O’Connor to the GEEX Talks lecture series. Stay tuned for a special guest at the end of the episode.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Methodologically, I’m an ethnographer which means that I practice the anthropological method of field work. I go to the places and try to experience that which I’m intending to study, but I also conduct interviews and archival research. I’m the author of “Fire Craft: Art, Body, and World Among Glassblowers”, published by Columbia University Press in August 2025. “Fire Craft” was written from four years of ethnographic field research at a public access hot shop in New York City. In short, “Fire Craft” is a book about the meaning of making.

ERIN O’CONNOR: My second book, which is a work in progress, is tentatively titled “The Middle Mineral and the Mine: A Geoanthropology of Studio Glass”. The goal of this book is to reveal how geology and art worlds, labor and extraction, and international political economy co-evolve and shape the experience of studio glassblowing.

EMILY LEACH: This season, GEEX Talks will explore “Material Life Cycles: Sand, Glass, and Practice”. This episode starts with a few stories from Erin’s book, “Fire Craft”, followed by a new story of studio glass, an exploration into her current research, a segment on mentors, guidance, works in progress from “The Middle Mineral and the Mine”, a studio tour, and a question from GEEX Talks Season 6 speaker Nehal El-Hadi. 

THE GOBLET

ERIN O’CONNOR: So today I’m going to talk a little bit about some stories from “Fire Craft”. Stories that helped transition my research into that of the mines and the minerals of studio glass. “Fire Craft” is set at New York Glass in the mid-2000s. The name, like all names of the book, is a pseudonym. These are collages I made for the purposes of illustrating “Fire Craft” and the stories they’re in.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Here you see the hot shop, the furnace. You’ll also find in the hot shop the hands and tools and equipment that’s typical in any glass studio. You have the shears, the tweezers, the block, the paddle, the bubbles, the punties of low pipes, and so on and so forth. In the glory hole, you’ll also find, of course, glass blowers. So here’s a bit of the characters from “Fire Craft”, and I use the word characters because I like New York Glass. All the names in “Fire Craft” are pseudonyms. So you’ll find Paul, who is my beginning glassblowing instructor, Diana, with whom I blow glass, a recovering poet and who became a lifelong friend. You’ll find Jude, and Finn, and Sarkis, and Alice, and Alan, who loves to ride fixed gear bikes and cares about nothing more in the world than becoming a better glassblower.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Along with all of them, you’ll also find maestros, and dukes, and werowances, and Renaissance metallurgists, and spies, and lovers, and glass aficionados, and a whole lot of philosophy, social theory, and all types of poetry and fiction.

ERIN O’CONNOR: I give these literary details because, as an ethnographer, I pursue my research questions through the everyday lives of glassblowers, myself included. I took classes, I tad, I volunteered, and I tell many of my stories through this experience. For me, learning about glass was about making stuff, just as it is for many people. Of course, I wanted to get things into the annealer, but it was also a method of answering an academic agenda. So, I was in an advanced beginning class with Paul, and one of the students asked him to demonstrate a goblet, and Paul’s like, “No, no, no…” And he reluctantly does it, and we’re all, you know, mystified, and we can’t believe it, but we go about doing it ourselves, as one does in a hot shop, right? We replicate.

ERIN O’CONNOR: And in that chapter… this is a story about the dynamic of apprenticeship, and how we learn moment by moment the skill as it goes, and what is the process of acquisition? What is said? What is observed? What is done? So I had a modicum of skill. I won’t use the word proficient, but I can do it. I’m the one with the spiral hair, and my partner, Heather, she’s opening the door for me. I feel confident in this moment, you know. Things are looking good for the goblet so far. I go back to the bench, blow it out, shape it up, have my bubble. The next part, Paul had demonstrated attaching a stem right with just a solid bit. We’re supposed to roll it out. Heather’s there rolling out this bit, looking good. It’s promising. She comes back to the bench and I go to take it right her bit with my diamond shears and I can’t, it’s so confusing to me. I’ve never taken a bit before, I’ve never attached a stem, and even though it’s solid… I still can do it—and I kid you not… and I describe this in the book—you could literally see the white. Basically, if I took the diamond shears right now and did it, it would sound exactly the same as it did that day.

ERIN O’CONNOR: So I’m all flustered. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve totally derailed. I’ve gone from being able to unable, success to failure. And Paul and Maureen, his teaching assistant, Maureen, are like, “Erin, cut it, take it to the glory hole!” So I go to the glory hole, and I’m very, very relieved, and I have this passage in this chapter that talks about reverie in the glory hole. I’m thinking about [Bob] Marley, I’m seeing things in the glory hole, the bit is sauntering and swaying… It’s basically a sexual encounter. And Bachelard does have this passage about the libido and the formation of libido and creativity and the role of reverie and the expression of that, so I like it. I’m happy there. I don’t want to be bantering, you know, with my diamond shears back at the bench.

ERIN O’CONNOR: But then again, Maureen’s like, “Erin, you got to get it back on task, it’s going to fall off.” So, I go back to the bench with Maureen’s help, I get it back on task, and basically I learned the lesson: I can’t follow the heat. I can use the heat, but I can’t follow the heat. This is about understanding what the relationship between the body and materiality is, right? So, what is it that’s being led by skill, by technique, and repetition and what is materially informed, and this, believe it or not, leads to “The Middle Mineral and the Mine”. I am so confident in this that on my way home that I’ve done it well, I put it in the annealer to cool that I sketch all these goblets, you know, on my way home on the train that I think are fit for Venetians, but when I come back the next day, this is what I find: the Globlet.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Paul’s like, “Erin, you didn’t make a goblet, you made a Globlet.” I love my Globlet. She’s a beauty. But the moment—far, far from a failure—presented me with the opportunity to explore what embodied knowledge was, and you have to think in the big scheme here. A theory of embodied knowledge is saying knowledge doesn’t exist as ideas that are in my head that get applied to the world, nor does it exist as pure sensory experience, like data, which I take in, and then my mind has to organize, and then you have knowledge.

ERIN O’CONNOR: No knowledge exists because I dwell with my body in the world and can sense it, like if you take a pen right now and touch anything, or just take your tool and touch your globlet, this hand ends here, right? It’s not ending in this hand, it’s ending here, and that extension is embodiment, so while I was able to embody the practices of gathering and going back to the bench and blowing it out, I lost that temporality of practice when taking the bit, so the globlet—far from a failure—was actually the perfect opportunity in proof of concept of embodied knowledge, because you’ll have people who are like, no, knowledge is just cognition, that’s it, it’s only the brain, there’s nothing else, but something as humble and modest as my flapjack globlet actually shows contrary to that, it shows that embodied knowledge and that temporality that is only about corporeal sight, right, that’s That’s the heart of all knowledge. I would argue so. [Pierre] Bourdieu has a fancy word for this. He calls it “habitus.” He’s a social French social theorist, and it’s about this theory of habitus that shows how the rules of a practice, the field, come together with the resources of the practice, which is capital right to form this habitus, such that you’re able to have a feel for the game.

ERIN O’CONNOR: It’s a difference from going from knowing the rules of the game to the feel of the game, but just keep in mind for later we’re talking about a very human body inhabiting, extending her human body through a tool to a material at its end, and those are in dialog, but they’re what one would call discrete ontological beings, meaning that we have boundaries, or if it’s a boundary between my human self and a boundary between the tool, but I was happy with this as. An example of this in this chart: the individual, right? It’s how embodied knowledge works for the individual. When we’re thinking about embodied knowledge, I don’t think the story of the goblet is only a case of the formation of self.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Yes, I became a glassblower through doing things like this and learning it, but it also formed a world.

WORKING THE DOORS

ERIN O’CONNOR: The second story I’d like to tell is about working the doors, teamwork, heat, and intercorporeality. Working the doors is a day that I went to work learning to blow glass. My beginning glassblowing instructor, Paul, had said, “Erin, if you really want to work, you have to work for a team.” So I had volunteered to work for a team that was blowing encalmos. And my position on the team that day, which involved four people, was working the doors. 

ERIN O’CONNOR: This was an August day in New York City. It was already 92 degrees at nine in the morning. I was sweating before I even got to the studio, and the studio, which was humid and pretty much windowless and breezeless at the time, was already a very, very, very hot, muggy place. So, the first thing I did was pull out the fans. They made a little difference and helped Oren, who was the gaffer of the team that day, set up the benches. The heat was really hard to ignore in this position of working for an assistant and working the doors, so hot, so much sweat. I was dehydrated despite drinking, I don’t know, five liters of water at least or something like that.

ERIN O’CONNOR: And when I got home that evening, and I was showering, I was thinking of this difference, like the gaffer would come in the next day, take out the encalmo vases, and take those home, but what did I go home with as the assistant, and again it was like going back to this idea of the fire, and in the shower, you’ll forgive the inexact analogy here, right? I could feel like those salt crystals, those sweat crystals roll off of me. It made me think about the relationship between the sweat and the salt crystals in the actual makeup of the batch or the glass itself, right, as a silica-soda mixture. While one is crystalline and rigid, and the other is not, I couldn’t help but see, or think, or have the insight to the fact that I, to some extent, had myself vitrified and become glassy.

ERIN O’CONNOR: The gaffer in this situation went home with objects. I went home with what I call an “intracorporeal experience”, right, of where the line between my human body and the non-human glass, the non-human heat was a bit blurred, right? It wasn’t clear, and clearly I was like becoming glass in a way such that I couldn’t ignore the fire, or I couldn’t harness it simply to production. With this insight, I went back and looked at the work of Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, and saw in his later work, “The Visible and Invisible”, that he had this idea of intraontology.

ERIN O’CONNOR: So, if you think about a human and a non-human, you have this idea of interaction, and that happens between discrete ontological entities, right, where there’s boundaries, intra—hence all this spiraling in this image—points to how the bodies, so to speak, and we can think about heat as one or fire as one, intra-penetrate and become each other. I was like, well, maybe there’s something about fire in “Fire Craft,” right?

ERIN O’CONNOR: And understanding embodiment, materiality, all the questions I wanted to ask that requires paying attention to the heat in a new way.

ERIN O’CONNOR: The sociologist in me was like, well, can’t just be Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist in France in the 20th century, who has thought this. So I was looking for alternative works, and I found that of Gilio-Whitaker, “As Long as Grass Grows”, looking at an indigenous ontology.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway,” right, where she’s getting into quantum physics. 

ERIN O’CONNOR: “Queer Phenomenology,” by Sarah Ahmed, that’s looking at what happens if I don’t follow the straight logic of production and instead follow what’s not supposed to be proximate or queer, what presents itself to me, and follow the heat toward a different end.

ERIN O’CONNOR: And Sylvia Wynter who’s looking at a post-colonial critique of the human, right? Specifically historical instances belonging to the Renaissance in liberal economics: “Man1” and “Man2”, she calls it.

ERIN O’CONNOR: I took these further readings to expand my idea of the intraontology, and that’s when I saw the reason why I was like focused on the hot shop, or thinking about the hot shop, and starting my stories there. Right, it had been set in some way, shape, or form upon the living materialities. There’s a reason, thinking of the stories that we tell, and I’ll get to that. Why it starts with the human in the practice in a way that ignores the living materialities or harnesses living materialities like fire to those of production, which happens with a specific idea of what it means to be human.

ERIN O’CONNOR:  So this is a quote from Donna Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble.”

ERIN O’CONNOR: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with. It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with. It matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” And in fancy terms, this is called material semiotics. So, you can’t have stories meaning semiotics that’s not simultaneously material. So, in this case, thinking about the materiality, what is it when we start with glass or the medium or the furnace, right, and don’t start with the living materialities that silica and soda, right, that that showery experience pointed me in the direction of what what stories do we tell when we don’t start there.

SETTING THE POT

ERIN O’CONNOR: Those experiences of fire and working the doors led me to rethink or think about the origins of studio glass histories, and taking from Sylvia Winter’s “Man1” and “Man2”, right, this idea that the human is not neutral and not universal. I thought back to the history of American Studio Glass. So this is what I call “History1”, right, and I’m thinking of this: here’s a human, Harvey Littleton, obviously. Here’s a furnace, and all we need to do right now is acknowledge that this is typically where it starts, right, Toledo Workshops in 1962.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Then we have “History2”. Dale Chihuly gets a Fulbright to go to Venini, but you go, and then you learn teamwork, and then we integrate teamwork right into the studio glass tradition, and then while we get our amalgamation today, so then I was like, why in the histories and stories of studio glass do we start with the furnace, right? Where does this come from? The sociologist in me, like, this isn’t specific to Littleton or to Chihuly. This must have a much deeper history.

ERIN O’CONNOR: And I went back to those stories that are told about the origins of glassmaking, and of course, I went to Pliny and the origins of glassmaking in his Natural History, right, which was written in the first century. This is an image that’s taken from the 1450s but let me just tell you the story in a nutshell. Pliny writes of it, there’s these Phoenician merchants who come and moor—and that’s going to be important to the story—moor on the River Belus. Not finding any suitable boulders to set their kitchen cauldron upon to cook their dinner, they take lumps of their cargo, which was natron or soda that they’d been transporting from Egypt to set their cauldron upon, they go ahead and start cooking their dinner, and then voila, all of a sudden wondrous streams of glass are flowing from beneath of it.

ERIN O’CONNOR: From that point onward, Pliny says they go off to, you know, add all kinds of minerals and produce wondrous things. What’s interesting about this is this is the expansion of the Roman Empire. Pliny precedes his account of the discovery of glass by a description of the river Belus as kind of sluggish. It needs the tides to purify it. It’s something that is, in some sense, “overcome.” When he tells that story of the merchants leaving, my argument or my insight here, it’s like: what does that mean to set the pot on the shores? And then you unearth or untether, as it were, the logic of glassmaking from the river Belus, from the land, from the sands there, and then it travels with the merchants far afield.

ERIN O’CONNOR: So while that story is most often told as a mooring of the merchants, from my perspective as a sociologist looking at power dynamics, imperial histories, colonization, ontologies, it’s the actual “unmooring” of the logic, such that it can then travel right on the routes of empire, so this is what I call the logic of vitrification. The logic of glassmaking becomes disembedded or unmoored from the land and travels around and travels wherever the pot is set. It’s that double ontology. The pot is set upon the living land, and that’s where our story is beginning, trying to unearth the deeper Western and imperial ontologies and epistemologies, and why we tell the story that we do the way that we do in American Studio Glass. So, with this in mind, for this reason, we’re at the further reaches of the Roman Empire. Right, you’re going to find glass furnaces, so this logic disembedded on moored from the river Belus travels on the roots of empire.

ERIN O’CONNOR: I look at what this means in the case of the history of glassmaking in Europe, but also specifically to the question of American studio glassmaking, I look at how this insight can help us understand how studio glass blowing is connected to that longer legacy of industrial and colonial glassmaking that it typically distinguishes itself from, so you have a logic, it’s traveling, it’s sent as a quote unquote first industry by the Virginia Company as part of the plantation of Jamestown.

ERIN O’CONNOR: In this far right photo, you see the Jamestown glass house with “The Trials of Glass” in the middle. This is from a 20th century publication. It’s undated, where a type of battle between a stereotypical quote unquote “savagery and civilization” is happening, and it’s happening before the Jamestown glass house. You can see two glass blowers in the background running with their blow pipes, and in my mind I’m like, why is this happening in front of the glass house, and the way that we can understand that is understanding the logic as a knowledge disembedded unmoored from the land that is connected to civilization and its overcoming of living materialities and natural resources.

ERIN O’CONNOR: So then, in this children’s book on the far left you see that a boy named Nathan is from “Nathan’s Dark House”. He’s longing for quote unquote enlightenment, and to bring light into his house via glass panes, and it’s a long story. He ends up getting the glass paintings by preserving natural resources that are for lumber trade, and in the very little graffiti etched in, and that wooden bench, you can see the initials “CW” for Casper Wistar, so it’s the Wistarburg Glass Works.

ERIN O’CONNOR: The method of glassmaking has changed, and how we do it, and we have like the solitary person in front of the furnace, we have teamwork in front of the furnace, but the fact that the story starts with the furnace, right, as a way of making new and transforming that has antecedents in the Roman Empire, and the routes of empire and imperial ways of thinking, that’s where the connection lies in the onto epistemology that we begin with that with man as a kind of author, man one, man two, right, and just real, basically it’s set upon the living materialities, and those living materialities get left out, so in this sense the glory hole, and in the history of industrialization in American studio glassblowing, and the function and use of the glory hole in American Studio Glass versus industry, right?

ERIN O’CONNOR: There’s a reason why, again, so much of the imagery of studio glass, many of our stories start here, and it has to do with the way of storytelling that privileges the human action intentionality at the expense of living materialities, and we can trace that all the way back to Pliny and the river Belus. In this sense, I would like to tell a new story of Studio Glass that gets off the quote unquote family tree, which Deleuze critiques for its arborescent genealogy, and this is from Finn Lynggaard’s book. Here it’s a tree. It’s very typical.

ERIN O’CONNOR: There’s nothing wrong with this, but my curiosity drives me to understand those roots that are not shown and that are holding up this tree. What’s hidden? What’s subterranean? What is the story that we’re not telling in the accounts of Studio Glass that we have, or in our practices, or our contemporary curriculum? So, it was this curiosity in line of inquiry, and it specifically takes place in a chapter in my book called “The Glassy State: Setting the Pot of Man and World,” that I see or forged a paradigm shift from anthropology to geoanthropology. So my questions remain the same in my new project, same as in “Fire Craft”, meaning social bonds, self and community, materiality, body and knowledge, cellular colonialism, ideology, and ontology, but as you can see here in this image, I want to connect the formation of objects to the formation of land and bring that subterranean and that hidden realm of the family tree into the narrative, so it’s not throwing out the narratives that exist, is giving them further facets and deeper dimension.

THE MIDDLE MINERAL AND THE MINE

ERIN O’CONNOR: So in “Fire Craft”, I say the word glass… I don’t know, one thousand times, five hundred times, I have no idea. I say the word batch a couple of times, but there’s no account of it, and it was with this paradigm shift with critical indigenous theory, queer phenomenology, new materialism, material feminism that I really wanted to get an account of the living land, because the formation of those objects is simultaneously a formation of the land. Spruce Pine, North Carolina, famed worldwide for its mica, feldspar, and quartz deposits. 

ERIN O’CONNOR: The palpability of minerals is very apparent, right? You literally see signs like this where you can do kind of touristy, you know, gem mining, panhandling. They advertise the stones that they have in windows, and indeed, as signed in the museum says, there’s no escape, minerals are everywhere. So you drive into Spruce Pine, you see the Quartz Corp, headquarters of AI high purity quartz. You see train cars leaving the town filled with minerals, and it’s with all of this that I came to the Spruce Pine Batch Company in July 2023 where I started my new field work for my second project on “The Middle Mineral and the Mine,” so bracketing my field work at the actual Batch Company. I’ll come back to that in the works in progress.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Right now, I really want to do exactly what that title says, and what I was hoping to do, you know, go from furnace to mine. People are going to be like, “Well, Erin, isn’t it from mine to furnace?” Like, no, we had to go from the furnace to mine and undo this onto-epistemology, right, and tell new stories.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Today’s environmental crises that are accountable to how our art making is simultaneously also a method of terraforming or world making in that way. So I went to a supplier of silica, right, for the glass industry in Appalachia, that I call Silica Mountain. I was taken up the mountain by mining engineers, geologists, and spoke with workers there to understand what it was to look for, to prospect, and to mine silica. 

ERIN O’CONNOR: The day I arrived, I actually couldn’t arrive in the morning. I arrived at three in the afternoon because they were quote unquote “pulling a shot” that morning. So, the mountain you see in front of you, at 3o’clock, you’ll notice that it’s cut in half. Right at 10:00 in the morning, there had been an entire mountain and they had pulled a shot. You can see that tiny little excavator there on one of the what they call shelves, so that pulling the shot had reduced the mountain to about ten tons of rubble.

ERIN O’CONNOR  

Now I want to be clear, silica is not primarily for studio glass. It’s for automotive and architectural glass, but again thinking back to that moment where we say we’re distinguished from industry, we’re distinguished from colonial glassmaking, from factory glassmaking. If we do that paradigm shift toward geoanthropology, it actually shows us that we’re not—it’s not separated. In fact, there’s a codependency, because if it weren’t for the automotive and architectural industries, Studio Glass wouldn’t get its supply of silica, because we simply wouldn’t have the demand, so we’re entwined with these more industrial trades or crafts.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Here, the mining engineer and sales person are showing me what to look for. This is the drill, this is prospecting, where you go in and core, pull out the silica, and Bob, you know, took it by the handful and let it run between his hands, and he says, “See, Erin, look how white it is. Look, how fine it is.” You know what you’re looking for in terms of glassmaking here. It’s being processed. It’s going into what’s called a jaw crusher, right? So we’re dynamiting and pulling a shot for rocks. We got to get that into the fine 325 mesh that we know being processed again through the jaw crushers, dried in the silos, the clay is removed, what is called tailings, and from there goes into these, where it’s there, we go tumbled around with all these little marbles to make different meshes, some of it is going to be for equestrians, some of it’s going to be for your toothpaste, some of it’s going to be for your car, or the windows that are letting light into this room, or the screen that we’re talking through, or this glass that I’m drinking from, or the glass that you’re making is going all to all different places.

ERIN O’CONNOR: I guess the reason I’m looking at this is to think about what is the material agency of the silica, like, how does silica show itself to people, the mining engineers, the workers, the sales person? How does it get read, and how does it animate different industries? Period. And then different trajectories of glassmaking, specifically. Here we have resource extractive. And then within the different ways that silica animates different trajectories going back to “History1” and “History2”, what new stories could we tell about studio glass if we were to pay attention to the minerals?

ERIN O’CONNOR: So, Chestnut Flats is known for these large veins of quartz, which you can see right here… It’s part of pegmatite that’s in the region, it’s mixed up with feldspar and mica, and then that little yellow is uranium staining. It was mined extensively at Chestnut Flats. This is a picture from 1932 but where it comes into the glassmaking story is in 1934 with the production of the polymer lens, which was the largest lens to be poured for a telescope, it was known as the glass giant. This is the lens that they’re standing on now.

ERIN O’CONNOR: The reason I’m telling you this is because this lens was poured at Corning Glass Works, March, 25, 1934. Harvey Littleton’s father, Jesse, worked on this project. This was a big deal. It was a ticketed event, and guess who was at that pouring of the lens, and this is documented history. No one less than Harvey Littleton himself.

ERIN O’CONNOR: So, the sociologist in me, I’m like: “This can’t be a coincidence.” Thinking about the founding of Spruce Pine Batch Company in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, in 1984 and the witnessing of the national event lens made from Spruce Pine quartz right in 1934 That December, there was a big parade in Corning again, ticketed where the lens was shipped to California, as Littleton’s biographer, Byrd, shows glass was part of the dinner conversations, right. And talking to Harvey’s son, Tom, they would even, you know, talk about the stress fractures in Jell-O at the dinner table, you know, thinking about glass properties.

ERIN O’CONNOR: And the sociologist in me is like “There’s no way that the pure quartz from Spruce Pine wasn’t discussed, or that the lens wasn’t discussed.” And yes, undoubtedly, the batch company was founded because of Penland. There’s a whole ‘nother history there related to mines and minerals and the art community that was there, but I think there’s another history to tell that connects the pure quartz of Chestnut Flats Mine to the eventual production of a quote unquote pure reliable commodity that the studio glass community can rely upon, right.

ERIN O’CONNOR: So thinking about the purity of the quartz, it was a natural phenomenon. It was a national story, right, to be wondered about and to be contemplated in this way. If we think from a geo-anthropological perspective, rather than just an anthropological, we can connect the pure quartz of spruce pine right in Chestnut Flats Mine to the eventual production of Spruce Pine Batch.

MENTORSHIP

ERIN O’CONNOR: The word mentor actually comes from the Odyssey. Odysseus, right, in the Odyssey, he’s the king of Ithaca. He leaves and he travels for a decade or more, wanders in an “Odyssey”, this rambling journey, and he appoints a person named Mentor to oversee and guide his son, Telemachus. Mentor actually really isn’t a man, even though he seems like a man, he’s actually Athena in disguise. Athena is the goddess of wisdom, of war, and she’s extraordinarily special because her parents are Zeus, on Mount Olympus, and Metis—I have a chapter in “Fire Craft” on Metis.

ERIN O’CONNOR: So the idea of the mentor, if you actually think of the word “men–”, the Proto-Indo-European root, it means to think with. Odysseus appoints Mentor not to tell his son what to do or oversee his son, but to guide his son in the process of discovery. Right, “Mentor” is really Athena. She’s about wisdom and experiential learning and knowledge through doing, because her mom, Metis, was about turning the world to our advantage and not necessarily cognitive thought. So, when I was asked to think about my mentors, I think about the people and places with whom I’ve thought.

ERIN O’CONNOR: One long-term mentor for me is Lake Huron. I’ve had this feeling long before I even thought about the word mentor, that Lake Huron was sort of my abiding matriarch in some way, shape, or form. I grew up across the street from Lake Huron in a small rural town in northern Michigan. I woke up to the sun rising over her eyes. I saw moons, I saw ice, I saw all of it at Lake Huron. She gave me the gift of the experience of wonder, of the experience of place and belonging, of possibility and horizon, the experience of beauty and tragedy. Right, there’s fun on the lake, people also die on the lake, the experience of entwinement, essentially of thinking, and the sensory experience. So, it’s like, if I think about where I’ve gone in life and how I’m always thinking through doing and doing through thinking and always relating sensuous experience and thought, I really credit Lake Huron with having given me that gift. It was like this belief or faith in life that I… I could learn through accepting what the world had to offer, and that that world was always ever changing.

ERIN O’CONNOR: One person I’d like to point out is my English high school teacher, English and creative writing, Mrs. Reasner. This is the inscription on the journal that I still have from her, and it reads:

ERIN O’CONNOR: “Now that you’ve learned the excitement of imagery, you can proceed to read the sensory details of your life, capture all emotional moments in writing. The human mind is so poor to remember. However, every man’s memory is his private literature. Aldous Huxley. Keep writing, she says, and saving. Best wishes always, Ann L. Reasner. Keep in touch!”

ERIN O’CONNOR: And you better believe it: I sent her a copy of “Fire Craft”. I’d always written stories since I was in elementary school, but she taught me that writing could be a way of plumbing the depths of one’s interiority, of engaging contradictions that one perceived in the world, of addressing the gap between what people said and what they actually did, and she let me know that this was all legitimate enterprise called literature. Well, I know I was bisexual since the time I was 10, and I didn’t have a way to express that or know that, so writing became a very safe place for me to explore the wonder that Lake Huron had given me to pursue those horizons that the lake had given me that maybe weren’t in the ready apparent world of my small town to take risk and like write myself out of whatever limitations, like I didn’t even perceive them at the time, but if I had a longing to pursue it, even if I didn’t know what it was, through writing and through that craft create possibilities and new worlds for myself, I’m first generation college student, nearly failed my first semester of college because I just didn’t know what was going on, but Mrs. Reasner gave me the tools to know that I could figure it out, that there was this method of exploration and questions that I wanted to answer.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Luckily, in college, I met a few other amazing mentors in Philosophy, Social Science, and Women’s Studies: Ron Puhek, Herbert Garelick, Marilyn Frye, Ron Wilkinson, and Richard Peterson. And I remember, like, my first classes with Professor Frye, and she said words like “patriarchy” and “lesbian literature”, and I can still remember the synopsis firing in my brain. So I just so credit my early high school English and creative writing teacher, and those college professors at a state school that gives kids exactly like me a chance and a break. 

ERIN O’CONNOR: “Fire Craft” is pretty much an auto-ethnography. I write about myself learning, and all the other characters play into it. That’s not the case with the middle mineral in the mine. It bridges natural sciences, social sciences, and art on people with that scientific knowledge, glass chemists, engineers, geologists, and two incredible mentors to me have been Tom, Tom Littleton, who owns and runs Spruce Pine Batch Company, and Greg Fiddler, who’s the operations manager at Spruce Pine Batch Company. You’re going to love to know that both Tom and Greg have training as anthropologists, either as undergrads or in graduate school. Also, my research would not be what it is today without them and their support and their knowledge.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Greg has accompanied me to the mines and himself developed a relationship with the geologists. There’s Candy and Steve in the upper right hand corner and. Doug and Steve in the bottom right hand corner, and they’ve spent so much time with me, teaching me how to sling batch, teaching me how to mix the minerals, teaching me the difference in the minerals, what they mean, how they’re sourced, and just genuinely being up for the adventure of what a geoanthropology in studio glass would look like, but there’s also the simple fact of the office at Spruce Pine Batch Company, which is one of my favorite places on the planet to be.

ERIN O’CONNOR: It’s filled with instruments, with historical posters from the Studio Glass movement, with all kinds of paperwork that it has to do with invoices and formulas and and little bits of history, the Diderot encyclopedia on the very back wall of glass makers, every run of batch gets logged. What’s in it, right? So you can go back and see what’s wrong.

ERIN O’CONNOR: The reason why it’s so important, of course, is for all these pragmatic reasons. What is a glass chemistry, and what does it mean? You know, the stories that we tell are so often about glassblowers, which, of course, makes sense, but thinking about the batch company and the relationship, you know, being allowing myself to go way far back beyond the Toledo workshops, I thought about “The Art of Glass” by Antonio Neri. It was the first book published in 1612 with glass recipes, right. And it’s very known in the field. There’s a super special word for Neri, and it’s not that he was an alchemist or a priest, because he was both of those, but he was also what was called a conciatore: someone who mixes glass batch.

ERIN O’CONNOR: I think about Greg and Tom as conciatores, and this office and the downstairs actual factory with that agglomerator as a conciatore laboratory or workshop, not to mention the hot shop in the back, where you actually pull the test right to see how the glass is working. The entire compound is a conciatore laboratory or workshop. I’m super thrilled in my new book to be bringing this concept of the conciatores, the glass maker, he who mixes bringing it back right integrating it into that hot shop story of the glass floor. This is what happens before the pot is set, and then how can that help us story anew?

GUIDANCE

ERIN O’CONNOR: I love talking about guidance hand in hand with mentoring, because I think that they’re two sides of the same coin. If you wanted to do research or write or just contemplate any of these questions that I brought up, one would be to pay attention to the world and really listen. Be open. What I’ve learned is that paying attention isn’t finding what you’re looking for, and the point of paying attention isn’t affirmation or identity or agreement, but it’s almost like the point is to come undone, and then, like, through coming undone. Like, if you receive a gift, right, if you’re paying attention and you let go, and you can receive something, then the amazing experience of that is that you can learn it’s more than just taking notes or doing this, like listening to what the world has to offer, what people have to offer, and what their stories are, and having a compassionate heart for that, and being open to whatever it is that they’re sharing. Listen.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Create a discipline. One thing I’ve learned is to do the movement. If you want to do something, you have to do it, and I know that doesn’t seem obvious, but sometimes we’re waiting to do the thing that we want to do, but we can’t do it unless we’re doing it. There was a famous editor of some New York magazine that I can’t remember the magazine or the editor anymore, but when his writers would come in and they say, “I can’t write, I have writer’s block, I can’t do it, his line to them was, “I didn’t tell you to write, I told you to type.”

ERIN O’CONNOR: And I love that, and this goes back to embodied knowledge, let your body do the walking, let your body do the writing, let your body do the making, and your body will lead you if you’re paying attention. Your body will give you what you want. It will emerge from the actual practice if you only have 20 minutes a day, it doesn’t matter, like, do that 20 minutes. So, the fact about doing and not being too worried about what it is that you’re doing, just like, get the motion going.

ERIN O’CONNOR: I have a schedule—a very strict schedule—so I can wake up anytime after four, I’m happy, but typically weekdays at five and I get up and I warm up by journaling. I love to journal. I have my candles, I have my disco ball, I have my tea, and I write dreams, a lot of dreams, because I often solve problems in my writing and dreams. I’ll wake up, be like, oh, that’s it, that’s the organization of the chapters of “Fire Craft”. I didn’t realize it was a whole quintessential cosmology. Boom, done.

ERIN O’CONNOR: And then also it’s just a way for you to get thinking, and I don’t care, like, what I journal. I can say the most mundane adolescent things, but it’s like warming up. So, whatever your practice is, and that warm up, do that. I have a specific time, like by six, I want to be transitioned to my desk, so I go from one place where I’m like in my warm-up period, get my coffee, this is all still before sunrise, and I get to my desk, and at my desk, if I can have one thought or one insight before that sun cracks the horizon: I’m happy. I’ve done my work for the day. And of course, I write afterwards, but I’ve done my work for the day, and in part I have to be strict like this, because after that—when that sun comes up—I have two children, I have to get them up and on the door, and then I switch to domestic chores, do all of that, and then I come back to writing, right, but at least I’ve staked the day, I’ve warmed up, and I’ve staked, and I put an idea into the universe, whatever it is, and then I can like loop back into that during my day practice.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Always take breaks, don’t not take breaks. Sometimes I don’t take a break, I’ll totally admit it, but if I do, and I force myself, it’s always in the walking, the swimming, the running, whatever it is, the running with your neighbor at the corner. I live in New York City—that happens all the time. And like that random conversation, and the idea, if you’re looking for it and paying attention, it’s going to come right. So give yourself that freedom, because sometimes if you’re working, working, working, then you’re really doing that act of seeking, and you’re just going to go where you think you’re supposed to, and not see the right thing. So, if you take a break and let things undo themselves, something will typically arise. Pursuing what you find joyous can bring good things, see art, go out and see other people, talk, talk to other people, see what’s going on in the world, always learn, write down dreams, breathe, remember that you are part of the universe, thinking about theoretical physics, and really dialing out some time, it helps your practice and the way that you’re thinking about it.

ERIN O’CONNOR: And I guess my one thing for glass blowers in particular would be don’t relegate the fire to the furnace or the glory hole, make it a part of all aspects of life, because combustion and that spark is going to be what gets you through. I have a really disciplined schedule, but it also brings me joy, so this is another important thing.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Whatever you do, please, whatever the discipline is, whatever the schedule is, I love waking up in the dark, you know. My dad did it. I woke up on Lake Huron with the sunrise. I love that you might not like it. You have to find what it is that brings you joy. When I was in graduate school, and I was doing all that political sociology, and I was in a class on museums, somebody said they were studying Detroit artists. I said, “Oh, my great grandpa was a Detroit artist, what do you know about la la?”

ERIN O’CONNOR: And the next week he comes in with a postcard, and I immediately recognize my great grandfather’s paintings, and I’m looking at them, I’m like, oh, I wonder what date it is, and I turn it over, and it’s for a show in Chicago the next month. They were doing this show, and I was so moved, because my great-grandfather checked milk bottles at a board and milk company, worked nine to five job, and then he painted in his living room or kitchen in the evenings in the corner, and his wife didn’t like it, so I was told waste of time on his paints, but he did it because he loved it.

ERIN O’CONNOR: I grew up in a family of makers and artists. I thought I can do everything proficiently in terms of theory and marks, but it doesn’t have my voice. It was at that moment that I turned to studies of craft, and I’ve never looked back.

WORK IN PROGRESS

ERIN O’CONNOR: So now I’d like to return to that field work that I bracketed to discuss from furnace to mine, and go through basically what I imagine as the layout or trajectory of the middle mineral in the mine. Right, these are all works in progress. So the first chapter I’d like to talk about is Chapter 2: “Slinging Batch: Embodying the Cool Rocks of Hot Glass.” So, this is me, I work there, learning to quote unquote sling batch. “Slinging batch”—I love this expression—is the actual mixing of the batch that comes in those ubiquitous 50 pound bags that show up in our studio. Because of silica and the risk of silicosis, right, you’re wearing masks to prevent breathing the particulates. There are numerous stages of this process. So, the first part is filling the hopper.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Part of this research in doing it is not only learning how to mix batch, but also developing a sense for the materials, so I worked with Doug here, who is amazing, took me around, taught me everything there is to know about glassmaking. We would fill up that hopper, which is the main ingredient, right? Go to the middle mineral station, which is a soda ash, potassium, other things like this, go to the small mineral station, where you have floor spar, lithium, other things like this. Finally, all of this gets mixed in the hopper, and it goes into this wheel, which is a precious item of studio glass glowing history: the agglomerator, it’s called. Designed and built in-house by Harvey, so it’s really an amazing piece of equipment that’s still used today, and is very, very special.

ERIN O’CONNOR: This is the actual slinging batch. It comes down from the red hopper into the yellow, gets mixed with water, so that it’s quote unquote agglomerated, which is not quite pelletized, right? It’s not like a clear pellet, but agglomerated, and it goes down the conveyor belt into the batch bags, is sealed up as you see in the foreground here, and shipped out. So, when you’re slinging batch like this, I have to tell you, it’s extraordinarily satisfying, and this is for someone coming from, you know, the furnace, and writing a whole book called “Fire Craft”, and being completely obsessed with fire, but when I had the hands in there doing it, it’s like it was like meeting someone new who you had known for a long time.

ERIN O’CONNOR: What can embodying this process of working with minerals, what insight can it lend to understanding glassmaking, right? Going back to those same questions: bodily knowledge, materiality, social bonds, communities, settler colonialism. What new insights can I gain through working with these raw materials? Right, we already saw the one in case of the history, but what about this, and specifically connected to that mine that we saw in Appalachia. Like, can I understand the craft of terraforming clear through the bagging of the minerals more deeply, right? And what can that tell me about studio craft art and practices?

ERIN O’CONNOR: The one thing about the Batch Company, and this is a problem that I am very curious to pursue, and that’s a question of beauty. I have to tell you that being in a cloud of silica is pretty amazingly beautiful, and it causes silicosis, right? So I’m thinking here about going back to intracorporeality. Stacey Alamo has a concept called transcorporeality, and she actually looked at silica miners and how they develop silicosis. So, what are the systems of power and privilege that allow for aesthetics and beauty, but can cause illness and death? And how can I walk that double-edged sword, or negotiate the contradiction, and what can it tell me about our practices as studio glassblowers.

ERIN O’CONNOR: One important part of this story, and it’s related to Doug, who was my mentor, who took me through the silica hopper, the middle station, and the small mineral station. Is that his father was also a miner, and he worked jack hammering feldspar, again the unknown presence of silica, and his father passed away in his 60s from silicosis. So the way I open this chapter is in part this, the beauty of the silica cloud and Doug’s story and the making of glass, so Doug himself is working with silica, negotiating his father’s own premature death, then I dial out to the accounts of miners who are working with silica, and how they negotiate risk, and again, this is all just to enrich and develop the story. We can still tell human stories, but we can make them more than human, and then maybe become better humans in the process by including these other narratives, whether they’re historical or contemporary.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Chapter 3. “Minerals on the Move: Connecting Global Glass Chains” is getting out of the primary ingredients of glass: silica, soda ash, lime. Minerals on the Move, I get into some of the more minor, quote unquote, minerals. Erbium, cobalt, fluorspar, barium, lithium, antimony, and then what I want to do is connect again, getting out of the hot shop, I want to think about the geopolitics that are connected to any one of these minerals, so it’s not only like mapping, okay, they came from here, but what are the geopolitics, and how does that change over time?

ERIN O’CONNOR: So, there’s two minerals I’ve done preliminary research on: one is lithium, looking at its move from North Carolina to Nevada. In Nevada, it moves from a quarry technique of mining, right, like actually getting it out of the rock to salt, where it’s evaporated. This is something to pay attention to today, given the recent Presidential Vault project, right, which is looking at on-shoring minerals again in the United States.

ERIN O’CONNOR: In Nevada, we see court cases regarding water pollution in the mining of lithium, notably in relation to indigenous groups and communities, it offshores even more into Chile, and here you had Pinochet opening markets, wanting to nationalize resources, and then the other case, antimony, which is a traditional mineral that you can see even in medieval hand-illuminated texts about metallurgy.

ERIN O’CONNOR: This is sourced primarily in China at this point, but going back into the archives, you can already see how geopolitics inserts itself into the sourcing of antimony. Here: it’s a letter from a company, you know, they have economic problems in Russia. It was the fall of the Soviet Union. People are looking to China now. Tariffs have been applied, and the prices are skyrocketing. Does any of this sound familiar? Right. So, there’s this whole geopolitical history that’s intertwined with what minerals we use and how we source them, and what type of lithium, say, it is in any instance, or antimony it is in any instance.

ERIN O’CONNOR: How does that animate a trajectory or a type of batch or style batch in a specific way? And what are the geopolitics of it? There’s the material agency to it, but there’s also a geopolitical story. Where does it come from, and how? And I think it just behooves us as people of the world to be familiar with these stories.

STUDIO TOUR

ERIN O’CONNOR: I’ve always had a making practice. So, I can remember even as a girl I had the easel in the desk. And the desk won out at the end of the day as a practice. Much of this, like easel or whatever you want to call it: that part of my studio practice takes place as field work. So I’m going out, I’m experiencing, I’m doing field work at the Batch Company, I’m making glass, and I write about it. A lot is happening like outside of these walls in one way, shape, or form, and it’s connected to making, and then the other part of the practice is the actual writing, so in the field I’m writing field notes, either by hand or typing, and then I come back and I start pulling stuff off my shelves that I think is related, and I start interweaving theory and practice.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Writing is like a… by which I mean, like handwriting. All these .25 high-tech micron pens. I write by hand, so I think about like typing as possibilities, like sketching. And then I go through, and I start doing the weaving work and the connecting work by hand. If I could have saved all of my papers, which you see here in the top right-hand corner of writing “Fire Craft”, I would have… I imagine it filling up an entire gallery space, and it would be like hinged, like on a binder, but the binder would be like 20 feet long, it’d be like five… I don’t know, 20,000 pages, and then the title would just be “Book”.

ERIN O’CONNOR: A couple of key books that I wanted to talk to you about, and this was torture. I gave geeks like a list of 100 and they’re like, no, Erin, that’s not okay. So I struggled and struggled and struggled, and these are the ones that came out. If I had to put books in a satchel and leave, and they were the only ones I could take, these would be the ones I would take. 

ERIN O’CONNOR: Simone Weil or “veɪ”, “Gravity and Grace.” She is from the early 20th century. She’s essentially a philosopher, was living in France, fighting the resistance in World War II, fled to England, and then refused to eat more than those in concentration camps, and died of tuberculosis at age 32 or 34, which is tragic. I constantly return to her thought: one, because it’s beautiful; two, because it is such heartfelt searching. So she was Jewish; she converted to Catholicism; she became kind of an ideological Marxist. It’s none of those points of departure or conclusions that interest me as much as her method of inquiry and her desire to know this is a person who perhaps more than anything made her life project about being open to the possibility of knowing.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Clarice Lispector, Brazilian novelist, essayist, poet, her “Agua Viva”. These aren’t like typical sociology texts, but just like the journals, I feel like it’s very important to read literature and poetry that’s beautiful and opens the world in ways that you can see anew. She’s essentially investigating the passions, what it means to love, what relationship is. She’s also investigating inequalities at the time, colonization. Her voice emerges from that type of inquiry where it’s hers alone and she sings it without apology.

ERIN O’CONNOR: “The Psychoanalysis of Fire.” I couldn’t be where I am without this book. When I first started writing about glassblowing and I was doing that embodied knowledge piece, I was working with an ethnographer, whose name is Loic Wacquant. And when I first present, he’s like, “Erin, have you heard of Bachelard?” And then, lo and behold, he not only has a psychoanalysis of fire, but the flame of a candle, and another entire one about the poetics of fire. He’s like looking at different figures in Greek history and doing a psychoanalysis of fire. In those cases, the idea of being an elemental ethnographer is fundamentally connected to Bachelard and taking it in a new direction.

ERIN O’CONNOR: “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.” These are organized by size, not importance. Audre Lorde, in this book, she has an essay that I always go back to, called “The Uses of the Erotic”, like in my new work, the promiscuity of silicon. Silicon hates to be alone. Silicon, she’s always getting together with everybody, specifically oxygen and silicon dioxide. I wrote “Materia Erotica” almost five years after finishing my PhD, and it was really Lorde and another author, June Jordan, who gave me the courage to ask about love and about Eros, and, with Lorde, ask about what it meant to deeply participate, as she calls it, in the erotic.

ERIN O’CONNOR: As long as grass grows, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a Colville Indigenous feminist and environmental thinker. Paradigm shifting. When I was getting into material feminism and really trying to bridge that gap between studies of art and environmental studies, it was Dina Gilio-Whitaker from whom I learned the limits of an Western environmental justice approach that regards nature as resources to be conserved. This is not about conserving resources. This is not about rights to resources that exercises the power of a Western ontology in which the human is in command over the non-human. She instead advocates not for understanding environmental justice in terms of rights, but in terms of responsibilities, again with that idea of respond in the responsibilities like kinship and land, and I didn’t want to talk about social justice within what she calls like a normative democratic capitalist paradigm, and I would have her book in my back pocket wherever I go.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Merleau-Ponty, “The Visible and the Invisible”. I mentioned this earlier: it’s “The Visible and the Invisible” where even his phenomenological orientation starts coming unraveled and that boundary between the human and non-human bodies becomes blurred. It’s been a valuable resource for me in a way to connect phenomenology in my early work and grow it in some sense into new materialism, into critical indigenous theory, post-colonial theory, queer, queer phenomenology. Right, it’s… The seeds of it are here, and I’m just so thankful for those fragments of later text, because they affirmed that I was on the right track.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Deleuze and Guattari, “A Thousand Plateaus”. Wow, what can I say? I love this, because you can see my books are destroyed, like “A Thousand Plateaus” is falling apart. All these are falling apart. Have traveled with me everywhere. There’s this great chapter called “The Nomadology.” And, in it, Deleuze and Guattari talk about pan-metallism, and like everything is metal, and there’s a tiniest little sliver of a mention there, where they talk about the salts, and it one hundred percent took me back to that shower, right, and noticing the relationship between the salt of my sweat and the salt of glass, and that movement toward an intercorporeality. So, it’s a notoriously obtuse and difficult text but one that I consistently go back to, just to get bearings.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Another one is Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition”. There are things I talk about with Arendt in “Fire Craft”, right, where, in some sense, I think she’s starting this book with the pot that’s set upon living materialities, and she has this distinction between animal laborers as works upon the world and homo faber as like the craftsperson who creates enduring objects through which we all can retrieve our identity and have like a world of plurality, my own mentor Richard Sennett in “The Craftsman” was a student of Arendt. And I go back to his texts and her texts as ways of creating a constellation of narratives about the maker and homo fiber. How can I then write new stories and different stories about homo faber?

ERIN O’CONNOR: I also just want to say something about the collages that you saw in the actual presentation today. I’m a collage maker. I’ve made collages forever. Two of my most important tools, which I keep at my desk: the Fiskars embroidery scissors and nothing less than an Elmer’s glue stick. I would actually… I put both of these things in my bag with my books. I would take these with me. This is the furnace. How is she? Complete with movable door. You can open, you can take your gather if you want. I’ve got my pipe here, and my bench… if you need to blow into your blow pipe, I have that for you. I experimented with people, but then I always write by candlelight, and then I had my candles accidentally dripped on my paper for my glory hole, and they looked just like a body, like the shape of a torso, so I cut out my wax strips, and that those became my people. But yeah, I just cut out paper and move it around, that’s all that I do. I glue it together, and I make things.

ERIN O’CONNOR: I think that’s all that I have.

WORKSHOP QUESTION WITH NEHAL EL-HADI

NEHAL EL-HADI: My question is for Erin O’Connor and it is: “How does your research and glassblowing practice affect your relationship with your own body?” How has that changed in the past, and or how do you anticipate it changing in the future?

NEHAL EL-HADI: Thank you, I loved “Fire Craft”.

ERIN O’CONNOR: Thank you so much for this question. It’s… it’s a great question, and it has to do with the entire trajectory of my thought. To sum it up, I think, like, that making is thinking, and that you can’t have thinking without making, so it’s like making is a way of thinking and forming knowledge in the world.

ERIN O’CONNOR: And if I hadn’t been or become a glassblower, and that’s a modest achievement, I will note, but if I hadn’t learned to blow glass and become the modest glass blower that I am, I don’t know if I would have had that paradigm shift, right, thinking of from that anthropology to the geoanthropology. So it’s like literally feeling the fire, working with the fire, making with the fire, being in commune with the fire and the heat and the molten material and the glass.

ERIN O’CONNOR: This is what led, or was at the forefront of, my thoughts about being the post-human material feminism. It’s what took me to critical indigenous ontology. It’s the thread that started to weave my interest in the arts together with my interest in ecology and the environment. My body and the changes in my body through learning to blow glass made me more than human in the way that I identify today, and it was also an inroad into my thinking about queer phenomenology and queer embodiment, not only as a bisexual woman, but also thinking about that, or being able to integrate that into, like, how I understood the development of skill and the achievement of proficiency, and working with materials in the case of studio glass.

ERIN O’CONNOR: So, thank you. That would be the short of it, I think.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

EMILY LEACH: Thanks for joining! If you enjoyed this lecture, check out previous GEEX Talks episodes featuring Dr. Cook, Dima Srouji, and Dr. Kerry Sinanan — exclusively available for subscribers in the GEEX Talks archive.

EMILY LEACH: The GEEX Talks lecture series features artists and researchers nominated by a community of glass educators, artists, and learners. For anyone seeking their path in this field, GEEX offers you a record of predominantly BIPOC and queer fine artists, craftspeople, scientists, historians, designers, community organizers, and more working with glass in traditional and unconventional ways.

EMILY LEACH: At its essence, GEEX is a grassroots project that has been bootstrapped together by a community that believes in the importance of this effort. Accordingly, GEEX relies on subscriptions, partnerships, and donations to make our public programs possible.

EMILY LEACH: GEEX Talks subscriptions are available to institutions (like colleges and universities) and individuals outside of academia (whether graduated, self-taught, or curious about glass). You can subscribe or donate to GEEX by visiting geex.glass/support.

EMILY LEACH: Many thanks to institutional subscribers for believing in the GEEX Talks project! Speaker honorariums are drawn from a pool of subscribers and supporters. Support for GEEX comes from viewers like you and makes all of GEEX programs and resources possible, including the GEEX Writing Center, BIPOC Community Table, Flame Affinity Group, and GEEX Educators Group.

EMILY LEACH: Thanks, as well, to our organizational partners. Organizational partnerships are intended for craft schools, glass schools, museums, cultural institutions, art service organizations, and truly all organizations interested in enriching their resources outside the bounds of their walls.

EMILY LEACH: This season of GEEX Talks—specifically the GEEX Shorts format—has been supported by the Wisconsin Special Projects Grant from Ruth Foundation for the Arts. The Wisconsin Special Projects Grant aims to build a robust and equitable arts ecosystem by investing in initiatives that rethink and reimagine past practices, bring an expansive range of voices into public and artistic discourse, and contribute to a more complex and abundant understanding of the histories, lived experiences, and futures of this region. GEEX is based in Madison, Wisconsin, the birthplace of American Studio Glass. With the support from Ruth Foundation for the Arts, GEEX reconnects Wisconsin’s glass history by revitalizing the narratives that define the field in a rapidly changing market, academic, and professional landscape.

EMILY LEACH: You can follow GEEX on social media @geexglass on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter to learn more about upcoming programs and events.

EMILY LEACH: Thanks to Nehal El-Hadi for joining this episode and the many mentors who guided on the path to discovery. Many, many thanks to Erin O’Connor! Lastly, thanks to you for listening, sharing, and supporting GEEX Talks. Stay tuned.

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