Photos by Billie Winter unless otherwise noted.

On a quiet evening in November 2020, Kelsey Fernkopf carted a very large piece of neon—32 feet long—into the middle of an empty alley in Ballard. It was mid-pandemic, the city on pause.

The sign shop where he worked was on pause, too. To fill the hours, Fernkopf began piecing together the most ambitious neon projects he’d ever attempted, working with lengths that would typically snap in the slightest breeze. Over the past year, he’d been gradually scaling up; in late 2019, he exhibited a show titled Big Neon at Steve Gilbert Studio on Capitol Hill. Those pieces were large, but they were still contained in the traditional way: strapped down and installed on a wall. He was thinking bigger. He posted mockups and photoshopped pictures of the hypothetical neon on Instagram, images that depicted neon surrounded by nature, or small human figures bathed in supersize glow. The posts included hashtags like #impossible and #ornot. Now it was time to fuck around and finally find out if neon could go this big and stay intact long enough to work. 

The fragile tube survived its journey across the street, and when the neon flickered on, everything shifted. Argon-tinted vapor charged the air lilac and blue. The asphalt glowed. Even manholes were drenched in aura. Fernkopf pulled out his phone and snapped some pictures. Even on camera, the atmosphere was electric. 

Five years and a lot of broken glass later, Big Neon has only gotten bigger. 

On a hot afternoon in August, Fernkopf is at work in Noble Neon, a large neon shop in South Park, where long tables are piled with old signs awaiting repair and new signs waiting to be gassed up. Another table is covered in hand-drawn schematics tracing out the exact curvature of right angles, U-bends, and sweeping 360-degree arcs. There’s also a dollhouse-size scale model of Foster/White Gallery filled with teeny glass tubes bent into miniature versions of the Big Neon pieces, placeholders to map out where everything will go in the exhibit that opens next month. 

Mercifully, the air inside Noble Neon is cool. Fernkopf is dressed in his usual uniform, a Van Halen tee with cut-off sleeves. As he talks about his work, he’s quick to break into a smile or crack a quip. There’s a salt-of-the-earth Kansas boy beneath the gritty PNW veneer, which means he’s humble, but also no-nonsense.

Why make this kind of art? 

“Because I can. Not many people can do what I do.”

Pester him enough, and he’ll admit to some superpowers. When Fernkopf started letting loose during 2020, he realized two crucial things: that he could make exceptionally large neon (most Big Neon pieces measure around 30 linear feet, some even more), and that he could handle it without it breaking. And that’s the really special part—some glass whisperer stuff. 

Fernkopf makes it all look easy. 

Pulling a 4-foot length of clear glass tube from a box, he flips a switch that instantly ignites a trio of torches. It’s a different kind of fire than a hot shop glory hole: a controlled, concise indigo flame. As he lowers the tube over a crossfire burner, he twirls it between fingers and thumbs until it heats to a magical temperature around 1000° Fahrenheit and suddenly turns to translucent taffy. The tube is kept from collapsing in on itself by a steady stream of air that Fernkopf is simultaneously blowing into one end of the glass rod through a rubber tube gripped between his lips. He quickly bends the limpid glass into a right angle. Just as quickly, it begins to crystallize. To make a neon sign, you repeat this process over and over with each bend in each letter (and pray the glass doesn’t break).

Fernkopf breaks a lot of things. 

“There’s no limit, really. I break some rules—I break some sign industry rules about what a good tube is. The sign industry is very focused on how long a tube will last. If everything’s done absolutely correctly, it could burn constantly for 70 years. I’m not concerned about that. It’s going to break in about five hours.”

Thanks to entities like Dale Chihuly and Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle is known for glass art; we’ve come to rival the legendary island of Murano, Italy, for leading the world in fine art glass production and innovation. But where does neon fit in? Does neon even fall within the purview of glass art? 

“I don’t want to say it’s light art,” Fernkopf says when posed the question. “I’m not going to deny the fact that it’s glass. Because it is glass. But the fact that it’s light… if it was all off, it’d be glass art.”

He’s definitely been asked this question before, and there definitely is not a definite answer. The existential contradictions inherent to neon don’t end there. At barely a century old, the medium is already antiquated, and while neon teeters on the perpetual cusp of extinction on account of declining trade schools and students, the possibilities—as far as contemporary art is concerned—have barely been tapped.

But Fernkopf was never making glass art, nor light art, nor neon art—until five years ago, that is.

As a student at the University of Kansas, Fernkopf studied painting and sculpture, working with materials like steel, rubber, and bronze (“sculpture with a capital S,” as he puts it). Like much of the art world in the early ’80s, he was enthralled with minimalism. He was especially intrigued by its predecessor, Suprematism, a Russian avant-garde movement that featured stripped-down geometry—circles, squares, rectangles—and a severely limited color palette. So severe that Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, painted in 1915, became a textbook example of one of the first monochrome paintings in Western art history.

When Fernkopf graduated, he bounced around Kansas for a while with his girlfriend, finally landing in Salina, where he was making sculpture part-time and pastries full-time at Carol Lee Donuts. Like many chapters in art history, this one ends (or begins) with a breakup, and Fernkopf suddenly found himself in the middle of nowhere with no reason to be there. Until one fateful evening when a teacher from the local neon trade school (called Neon Stuff) plied Fernkopf with beer and convinced him to enroll in a five-week class. 

“Since I was stuck there making donuts, I said, okay, I’ll do it,” Fernkopf says with a laugh. 

It turned out he was good at neon. Really good. Six weeks after that beer, Fernkopf was working at a neon shop in Kansas City. A year after that, in 1987, he packed up for Seattle to work at National Sign Corporation, a renowned shop still in operation down the road in South Park. 

Fernkopf wasn’t making capital-N “Neon Art,” though. Neon was just the day job. 

He was, however, making sculpture. By the late ’90s, Fernkopf was known in Seattle as “The Horse Guy” for his pop-art-flavored, maximalist assemblages (represented by the now-defunct Howard House) made from deconstructed Breyer Horses, which he cut up and stuffed with miniature dollhouse trinkets and other curios. While he was playing with plastic, neon was gradually gaining traction in the art world. Artists like Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin, and Glenn Ligon are famous for lighting up museums with neon, primarily using it to render text (or in Nauman’s case, an occasional orgy). Recently, Nicholas Galanin’s Neon American Anthem put neon on display at Seattle Art Museum. Yet the majority of artists never touch the neon itself; fabrication is shopped out to the sign studios.

It’s one reason why neon art has never gotten really interesting or weird. It’s too delicate, tricky, and expensive a material to play with if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Fernkopf hoped to bridge that accessibility and education gap when he cofounded, along with neon artist Dylan Neuwirth, Western Neon School of Art in 2018. Offering classes for beginner students, the school was slowly gaining momentum when COVID hit. After numerous fits and starts, the school finally shuttered. But when one door closes, a big neon portal opens.

Since snapping his first photos in the alley, Fernkopf has forged ahead, mounting numerous installations of Big Neon both indoors and en plein air. In 2022, Pilchuck Glass School invited Fernkopf to embed a series of oversize neon pieces across the school’s bucolic, sprawling campus for the year’s iteration of Light the Forest, their annual self-guided walking tour of neon art installations. As daylight turned to dusk and drained to dark, the luminous shapes slowly seemed to wake, color coming to life by the minute: a bright red wave perched atop a hill, a rectilinear blue box framing the setting sun, a blue door hovering over still water, reflecting its own portal form. The experience of Big Neon in person is nothing short of otherworldly. Its physical—and spiritual—intensity recalls the Light and Space experiments of the artists Dan Flavin and James Turrell, who used light and structure to conjure the ecstatic and sublime.

The ghost of Suprematism lingers in his primary palette, but Fernkopf insists the colors and forms write their own narratives—he isn’t suggesting anything. The blue doors, though… those get people every time.

But there’s a problem with using neon in situ like this (beyond the risk of breakage, including the occasional visitor, child, or drunk falling onto a fragile tube). Whether sited in woods or under a bridge, the light only lasts as long as there are batteries to power a high-voltage transformer to ignite the inert gas into life. For that reason, the ethereal experience is ephemeral, too. 

Fortunately (as Fernkopf discovered the first time he powered on his big neon), cameras can capture some of the aura. Since 2022, he has been collaborating with close friend and photographer Steve Gilbert to document his installations. Gilbert, a high school friend of Fernkopf back in Kansas, also studied art at the University of Kansas. They both separately made their way to Seattle in time for the ’90s, when Gilbert captured some of the most photogenic moments of the exploding music scene. 

For the past four years, the pair have been collaborating to make photographs, documenting sites across Washington and beyond. Like the time in 2023 when Fernkopf drove a U-Haul across four states, filled with 14 delicate pieces of neon (only two broke), to the Jentel Artist Residency in Banner, Wyoming, where Gilbert joined him to photograph the work amid rugged rock formations and backdrops of undiluted stardust. Two months after that, they installed Vanishing Point: A Neon Constellation for a one-night display on the grounds of Seattle Airport. Sited in a field adjacent to the airport’s cell phone lot, the lights were visible from ground, aircraft, and light rail. 

The photographs are stunning works of art in themselves, but to experience the luminous pieces firsthand is worth the effort. In September, Outside: In opens at Foster/White, bringing both Gilbert’s photographs and some very large neon works into the gallery. Two of Fernkopf’s blue doors are part of the group exhibition Haunted, which opens in October at the Tacoma Art Museum. 

While it’s not quite the same as coming across a phosphorescent portal in the midst of the woods, or stumbling on Gilbert and Fernkopf as they set a trail aglow, there is something inexplicably electrifying about being bathed in the light of noble gas this big and bright—baptism by neon. 

Outside: In opens Sept. 23 at Foster/White Gallery; opening reception Sept. 26 features a musical performance by Tekla Cunningham. Haunted opens Oct. 11 at Tacoma Art Museum.