We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kate Hush a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kate , appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
I believe to truly understand one’s neon journey, it’s best to be at least a little familiar with the process of how neon is made, so allow me to try and explain. Imagine you have a line drawing sitting on a tabletop in front of you, and in your hands you have a hollow glass tube that is a few feet long (think of a drinking straw). Then next to you, the table, the drawing, and the glass tubing in your hands are several torches all emitting fire and flames. These torches are used to heat up small sections of your glass into a soft and pliable state. You do this by holding your tubing in the flames until it is brought to the perfect limberness, then you remove it from the heat and place it onto your tabletop drawing as fast as you can, all the while twisting and bending and manipulating your softened glass into mimicking the lines of your design. You do this over and over and over again until your drawing has been fully recreated in the glass tubing.
For me, learning the craft of creating neon lighting was a combination of hasty guidance and self perseverance. In 2011 I participated in a 2 day course at a glass studio in Brooklyn, New York where the class description mentioned that you would learn how to bend neon in only two afternoons. A claim that would turn out to be a bit of a half truth. This is because while you can certainly observe how someone else is able to bend neon properly within the scope of a few days, the actual acquisition of the skills needed to do it takes years to hone. There are no shortcuts, and there is certainly no opportunity to bribe your way into developing the techniques needed in a fraction of the time. There is only practice and patience; and practice, and practice, and practice again. I didn’t quite know what to expect during this course when I first walked in, all I knew were two things – I loved the medium of neon, and I had zero experience working with glass. To say I felt like an ice cube thrown into a scorching pan is an understatement. It was erratic and rushed and thrilling and frightening, and also hard to absorb any kind of real skill or knowledge in that short amount of time, but from that moment on, I knew neon was for me and I never looked back. I would go on to work in the very neon studio where I was first introduced to the material, learning all of the pre and post production processes during the 9-5 hours, and teaching myself to bend my own artwork during the nights and the weekends over several steadfast years. The only way to get good at neon, is to never give up. There is no other method.
Kate , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a conceptual artist who primarily works in the medium of neon lighting, and in the beginning of my career I found that when I was going into the field of conceptual art it was primarily passed down and created through mediums such as film, writing, photography, or graphic art that I didn’t necessarily connect with in the way I immediately did with neon. And even before I ever had it in my hands, I had been captivated by the role neon played within other mediums such as film, where it’s used scenically as a way to heighten or alter the mood of a story – and it really does. Neon is something special in itself and I wanted to explore if there was a way in which I could tell the actual story with the neon as opposed to only using it as an element within a story. So, in my first years of learning how to work with it, I trialed and errored my way through piece after piece until I came up with a signature style of sculpting vignettes in light, combining figures with landscapes and objects and creating my own freeze frames. I see my neon work as not only being made up of light, but it also captures the innate predicaments in which light can be created – shown through my imagery of wily glass-sculpted women. Light is made through scintillation, incandescence, or triboluminescence, in other terms – through friction and heat, and I see the maximal visuals I create make the perfect marriage between subject and medium. People come to me to make something thematic, and lavish, and rare. I’m not usually asked to create something like a cute sign for a downtown boutique, and that’s ok with me.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
All of the neon artwork I do always starts as a digital illustration, and the more pieces I would sketch out on my computer, the more interested I became in creating strictly digital artworks, especially animations. With these digital pieces I’m able to create visuals in a neon style that may not be feasible to fabricate in actual glass. They’re really the neon fantasy pieces of my collection, and I’ve been making them for years now. But before NFTs emerged it always felt like digital pieces were made and posted, only to be forever lost in the ether of the internet. It was very hard to track ownership of a digital project and you really had no way of having them traced back to you if someone else decided to repost your piece online without any credit. So I really do love the idea behind NFTs that allows artists who create digitally to not only attach permanent artist credits to their work, but it also gives them a chance to gain some income from pieces that don’t leave the screen, which is hard! It’s still so new and there are definitely some kinks to work out, but I really think it helped push otherwise stymied art institutions and galleries into taking steps to see digital artwork in a more serious way. I actually did an NFT drop last summer with some wonderful people who guided me through all the not so easily understood aspects of it all, they’re called Defi Society Studio, I created a special collection of my digital neon works called Hotel Hush which you can see on my website (katehush.com), and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Keeping a little bit of mystery about oneself is how it should be done. I think that captivates people much more than oversharing. Too much exposure into ones comings and goings will only color people’s views of everything you put out there and in ways that might not always be positive. Make your online presence like a solar event, they don’t happen that often but when they do everyone’s watching. If you’re just starting out I think making your first few posts ciphers is a great idea.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.katehush.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/katehush
Image Credits
all images taken by Kate Hush