Waste energizes art at Green Energy Park

Larry Griffin

lgriffin@thesmokymountaintimes.com

In Dillsboro’s Green Energy Park, gas from the nearby landfill is put to good use as it helps power the work of glassblowers and blacksmiths.

The studios are nestled inside a large warehouse adorned with colorful graffiti murals – it looks like the kind of place you’d naturally find artists.

The park is owned by Jackson County, and is part of the public works department in that county. Project Director Timm Muth, an engineer, has helmed the project since its 2005 inception, and Muth said the idea was one that many were skeptical of before he got it rolling.

Many other engineers said the idea of channeling gas into power to do art wouldn’t work. And when work started on the project, the land was going to waste, full of unused scraps of police cars and other detritus. Yet, now, it’s thriving.

Muth credits the park’s success to the ability to think outside the box.

“[The other engineers] couldn’t think outside the box,” he said. “They weren’t ADD enough to try it for themselves. They ran calculations and thought it wouldn’t work. I ran some ones of my own.”

Part of what they thought would never work was the fact that the gas from the landfill was only 68% methane, which they perceived as overly difficult to reach the temperature needed to do glass and metal work.

“That was obviously incorrect,” Muth said. “We reach 2,000 to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit here every day.”

Muth said they got around the problem by modifying their equipment: “When we had equipment and didn’t like the way it was working, we built all new equipment.” It was a lot of trial and error, according to him – tinkering around and paying attention to what worked and what didn’t. They bought forges designed to run on propane rather than natural gas, which didn’t run as well on the natural gas. So, they began modifying them, and changed the size of burn orifices and the type of air supply to work with the limits of the landfill.

Eventually, they got it right, and Muth moved onto the main idea for the park – to rent out the space and give artists a space to do their work.

“Artists can’t make a living if they don’t have a place to work,” he said. “In the case of fire artists, energy costs are one of, if not the largest expenses. By building a facility where artists can come in and rent a space by the hour, they don’t have to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital to build their own facility. Most of these people live here in the county. They make money, spending it on mortgage, or rent, or buying groceries or gasoline. That money stays here in the community.”

Now, at any given point in the day, one milling about the Green Energy Park might find apprentices or master glass blowers or blacksmiths doing their work, handling unbelievably infernal temperatures with ease, to create art. At the glassblowing studio, apprentice Rachel Raming blows fire on a bubble of glass as she takes it in and out of a giant furnace. Muth said the glass was “the consistency of warm honey.”

Raming said the process of glassblowing was certainly risky – but worth it in the end.

“You kind of get used to it,” she said. “I’ve had a few burns at the beginning of my career. It humbled me.”

Raming first came to the Green Energy Park in college to help a friend work on the mural out front, which depicts a cartoon version of how the park’s energy recycling works – showing cartoon microbes eating trash and producing gas, which is then sucked out by the Green Energy Park.

While there, Raming fell in love with the place and decided to come back and begin working there as a glassblower. Her current project involves trying to make the glass look like there’s paint strokes on it.

Around the corner is the metal shop, where all manner of swords and metal-crafted trinkets lie on tables and hang from hooks. The main blacksmith at the Green Energy Park is Brock Martin, who was actually the first intern at the park in 2006, and has since made blacksmithing into a veritable career.

One of the current apprentices is Jesse Bolding, who said that the blacksmithing work often consists of making replicas of famous items from video games like “Kingdom Hearts” or movies like “Lord of the Rings” for those trying to make costumes famous from the series.

But the real fun comes when they finish their contracted jobs and can just “do the stuff we love to do,” which he said could sometimes just be messing around and saying “let’s make a sword today” out of nowhere.

Bolding said the job was good for his mental health.

“It’s not only great for the environment, but I get to make and create super fun things,” he said.

“It’s a positive for my mental heath, it’s helping me further my business, and I can set my children up to succeed. I love making knives – it’s a lot of fun. It makes me happy to be here.”

Muth said the work is gratifying to him personally, on another level from his previous career as an engineer.

“It’s been the highlight of my career,” he said. “It’s the first opportunity I had working as an engineer where I could use my skills to directly benefit the community I lived in. When I worked for a big utility or big engineering design company, and if I got hit by a bus one day, nobody would notice, somebody else would just come in the next day and do the job. And if the company made more money that year, you didn’t benefit from that. Here, I get to see not only people getting a check for the hard work they put in, but we get to bring children in, and talk about renewable energy, and open their eyes and their minds up.”

Muth was referring to the various kids’ school classes that come to the Green Energy Park to learn about the various things that go on there.

There are other classes offered, too, to teach people how to do things like make gauntlets or knives, or to learn the basics of glass blowing. And the Green Energy Park shows the work of its artists in galleries – they have several pieces at Highland’s Bascom gallery right now, for a three-month-long show.

Artists come and go, sometimes driving from far away to rent out space and make use of the place’s amenities. Muth said one artist, who’d been commuting from Asheville for a year, ended up finally just buying a house in Jackson County to be close to the park and the art studios.

“I can drive around in Swain County, or Haywood County, and see the same mountains, the same river,” Muth said. “But you’re only gonna find one Green Energy Park.”