Look inside the kitchen cabinets of influencers like Emily Mariko or chef and writer Samin Nosrat, and you’ll find East Fork Pottery’s signature thick-rimmed, contemporary wares, offered in an array of poetically named proprietary glazes (the seasonal burgundy is “wine dark sea”; a speckled earth tone is “morel”). Launched in 2009 by Alex Matisse, the 40-year-old great-grandson of Henri Matisse, the beloved brand is emblematic of aspirational homemaking.
“I started East Fork as not anything like it is today: as a potter making pots,” Alex Matisse told Vanity Fair over Zoom from one of the company’s factories. “I was trained in this very specific school of making here in North Carolina. Went out on my own and set up a pottery in very rural North Carolina, outside of Asheville, and was making very different work than we make today.”
Now, with a workforce of over 110 employees making close to 600,000 pieces a year, East Fork’s wares are so popular online that limited or deadstock color palettes can resell for 16 times their original prices and collectors have fan-operated buy, sell, and trade markets. When Hurricane Helene—which made landfall on September 26, impacting Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina—reached the mountain region of western North Carolina, East Fork’s candid social media updates took on a new urgency. Notions of a “climate haven” (as Asheville has been labeled given that it’s inland, at a high elevation, and has cooler-than-average temperatures) were dashed. The shifting behaviors of tropical storms amid climate change now makes the so-called unprecedented more normal.
Water damage surrounding East Fork’s coveted pottery pieces.Courtesy of East Fork.
“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.
