After Hurricane Helene, East Fork Pottery and Asheville Artists Set a Course Forward

“For people up here who live in a place that they thought was sort of untouchable from climate change to be touched so drastically, so quickly, that’s a big one,” Matisse said.

Matisse echoes what climate activists and scientists routinely emphasize: that climate change impacts everyone. “The most disadvantaged populations feel it first, and then other people start to feel it. And I think this is one of those examples.”

For East Fork, the lessons of an earlier calamity provided a roadmap for handling this one as the team followed, what he calls, their COVID “playbook” to ensure employees remain paid as the region recovers. Given East Fork’s large-scale operation, Matisse felt it was inappropriate to crowdfund, so the company opted for a familiar option, hosting a sale instead. “We make and sell pottery,” Matisse said. “So let’s do that.” East Fork has focused its social media presence on spotlighting the fundraisers, mutual aid calls, and raffles of other smaller makers and artists of the area and beyond, including Atlanta where there is an East Fork brick-and-mortar store.

“We have this customer base: they love us, they want to see us survive, they want to see us thrive; they want to see our community do the same thing.”

The day before our call Matisse traveled to Bat Cave—a town ravaged by Hurricane Helene—where Matisse’s family friend, sculptor Michael Sherrill, the founder of Mudtools, which handmakes tools for artists, lives. Flooding rendered roads inaccessible and aid deliveries were being delivered by foot or helicopter. “Mudtools lost everything,” Matisse said. “They had a shipping container filled with a quarter million dollars of finished-goods inventory that is now wrapped around the piling of the bridge, just crumpled in half.” Mudtools posted a before-and-after of their washed-away facilities to their Instagram. “Our office and production facility where we built everything from the ground up is no longer standing,” the team wrote. Mudtools has started a Go Fund Me to help it recover from the hurricane.

Matisse arrived at Sherrill’s to deliver a hug, some beer, and a generator to be passed on to someone else in the area. “But tonight after work, I’m going to bring him a Starlink. There’s those little ways, right? To me, those are the most meaningful.”