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.

“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.”

Also along Matisse’s route would have been Melissa Weiss’s studio, a communal facility shared by 15 other artists that Weiss has run for 11 years. “We lost it all, but not just me, everybody in there,” Weiss said on a phone call with VF. “Nobody was ever worried about that building getting water in it. But by Wednesday before the storm, it became clear.”

“We moved everything we could. We have a short school bus: we loaded that, we just frantically—it was chaos—packed up most of the pots. We did all we could, we evacuated and then they were saying 27 feet. And that’s when I knew that nothing we did in there mattered, and it was all going to be gone.”

Once the water receded, Weiss returned to see the damage for herself. “I think I was still in denial,” she said. “Everything covered in mud and water, everything destroyed. We realized how devastated our community was and how people lost everything, including their houses, their lives, whole towns were destroyed.”

“We didn’t even know that at first because we were completely cut off. We had no power, we had no radio. There was a Wi-Fi spot at the library. So we were connecting that way and hearing stories. And then we lost water.”

Weiss and her husband Elijah decided to make further use of their bus at that point. “We had a friend from Shelby acquire a 270-gallon water tank. We installed it in our bus and immediately went and filled it up with well water from Lester and started driving water around. It just felt like what we needed to do.”

While the fundraising efforts in the short term are meeting some immediate needs, there is a precarity for those whose livelihoods directly depend not only on tools but studio, production, and storage spaces that no longer exist. “Aid is coming in waves, it’s just overwhelming,” Matisse said, before mentioning the plight of another local potter, Josh Copus, based in Marshall, who opened Old Marshall Jail Hotel in 2021. “He’s been mucking out his hotel. He’s not firing his kiln. The loss of income is going to be so big and that’s going to be felt. So how can we amplify folks?”

Both Weiss and Matisse are foremost occupied with the new daily routine of wellness checks and ensuring neighbors receive basic necessities. Alongside calls for aid is the need for hands-on distribution and recovery efforts. In the midst of all of this, there’s a concern over what the future will look like for the area’s creative community. Matisse brings up the collectors who have previously shown up for artists as having some potential; Weiss wonders whether this could be a turning point for reevaluation on the part of Asheville’s leadership.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen after this,” Weiss said. “But if a town loses their entire arts community, and that’s what they promote as part of their tourism, I’m hoping they start caring about the people that live here more and making it possible to live here for people, not for tourism.”

She added, “We all need to band together and help each other until everything’s fixed, not just the city water, the whole region. I think that’s happening, and I hope it continues.”