Design in Community
The Seattle Design Festival tells a story. This story culminates in an annual celebration of our design community each summer, but the connections we forge within that community, and the stories they have to share, last throughout the year. Follow along with Design in Community as we highlight some of the design stories from our community through photos and sounds.
This Seattle based Neon artist manifests line drawings in reality
If you stroll around Seattle, you might spot a ten-foot-wide glowing neon circle in the middle of an alley, or a glowing rectangle amidst the wooded patches of Discovery Park. Don’t worry! This isn’t a portal to the upside-down or an alternate universe. This is simply an invitation to Seattleites to step through, reimagine and rethink the way they look at their surroundings, from artist Kelsey Fernkopf.
Based out of Ballard’s eclectic and artistic enclave, Fernkopf has been bending tubes as long as ten meters and injecting them with neon to create installations that play with perception for the last thirty years.
But neon is not typical light. “Here’s what I tell people,” Fernkopf says. “Neon is different than LED light or any other light.” It has a luminescence, a quality that interacts with its surroundings rather than simply illuminating them. Neon suspends illusion. “I think that it [the glow] actually bends space,” adds Fernkopf.
With a degree in Sculpture from the University of Kansas, Fernkopf started as a neon Signmaker in Seattle in the nineties. From Wonder bread to Rainier Brewery his signages have been glowing bright and high across the cityscape. Yet the urge to spin a whirligig after work hours and experiment with two dimensional shapes to create dramatic illusions in space has scaled up to a full-fledged design practice, since the last decade.
The whirring and gurgling sounds of the gas and air blower signals Big Neon Studio’s workshop space coming to life, as Kelsey demonstrates drop and rise turns, double bends and splices to meticulously craft bold lettering using fragile glass tubes. It’s a process that takes glass, electrodes, pumps, and gas and then transforms it into practical signage or elevates it into art.
Fernkopf says the tube acts like a kiln. “You’ve got a tube sitting there that has an inert environment in it and a vacuum,” he explains. “You just isolate the vacuum pump, open one of those – the red or the blue knob, which is argon or neon gas – and the gas just gets sucked into the tube, and you seal it off.”
Fernkopf finds inspiration all around him. “I’ll be out in nature a lot of times or in the city,” he says. “I’ll visualize a piece of neon in that setting. And while he has had many successes, Fernkopf often re-evaluates his work as he scrolls through old photos of his installations. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out as much,” he acknowledges.
But the pandemic helped him find a broader canvas. It was the moment when he started to place his work in unexpected places throughout Seattle.“It gave me something to do,” he says. But it also gave him something else. It offered him freedom to push his concepts further. “Because the streets were empty and the alleys were empty, I could set stuff out there and no one was around,” recalls Fernkopf. “And nobody cared.”
He continues to muse on the interaction between space, light, and luminescence. Sometimes he thinks that he could have done more to challenge audiences to step into a different dimension. Mostly Fernkopf hopes that others will discover the sense of play that moves him. “The what-if,” he says, “is always there for me as far as making something that challenges me, something that is exciting for me, challenging and fun.”
Credits
Photography: John Robancho
Audio: Mitchelle D’Souza
Production: Matt McWilliams
Copy: Stuti Shah