We were lucky to catch up with Linda Sue Price recently and have shared our conversation below.

Linda Sue, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I started learning to bend in 2005. There is an idea that 10,000 hours of practice is what you need to gain expertise in performance-based fields. It is now 2023 and I have completed just over 3400 hours so I have a way to go.

The basics… there are three fires that one works in—a ribbon burner, a cross fire and a hand torch. To bend, you start with a 4 foot straight piece of glass that can be trimmed for a specific pattern. You then put a cork in one end and the rubber end of the blow hose into the other end. The blow hose is used to blow air into the tube while it is heating so that the tube doesn’t collapse. Then you move the tube into the fire for heating. The goal is to heat the right amount of glass for the bend you are making, get it hot enough and heat it evenly by rotating the glass or the hand torch.

When I first started to learn how to bend my intention was to bend free form. However, in order to get in touch with the glass I had to practice bending to pattern. Pattern bending comes from the head whereas freeform comes from the gut. Most benders bend to pattern. When bending freeform I feel very connected to the glass. It’s like having a conversation with the glass. Some times the communication flows and other times not.

There are so many things to consider when bending whether to pattern or freeform—how to approach the fire so that the weight of the tube isn’t awkward, is positioned so the rotation can happen without your fingers getting hot and then how to exit the fire so you are positioned to make the intended bend, and positioning the blow hose so it doesn’t get in the way.

In the beginning I under heated the glass because when the glass was at the right heat it was too easy to accidentally stretch the glass. By under heating I eliminated the stretching but then I got kinks because the glass wasn’t hot enough. Once I started getting the glass hot enough, I struggled with over inflation. Part of the process of bending is having a blow hose attached so you can inflate the glass when it gets hot to keep it from collapsing.

Then In my pattern practice, I struggled with making ‘U’ bends without getting kinking on the inside. I discovered that I was twisting the glass coming out of the fire. It would look great when I came out of the fire but by the time I got it to the pattern on the workbench, it would kink. After some focused practice I figured out that I was twisting the glass so I spent a few months breaking that habit.

There is no scientific process to this. It is just hours of practice and learning to read the glass. And each time you figure out what you are doing wrong, to fix that you have to relearn the bending process. I started counting the rotations I was making in the fires. Counting helps me stay focused so I drift less and when I come back, I know where I am in the rotation.

At times you have to relearn something. A few years back I was struggling. It turned out that I was heating too much glass and then was not in the center of the fire. After two or three weeks of trying different heats, I remembered being told, if it is not working try something different so I moved the glass closer to me in the cross fire and suddenly I was able to make the U bend with no kinks, no funky shape and get the necessary inflation.

Another time I was trying to bend a shape that used both pattern and freeform and was flailing at both. I tried a variety of schemes but kept running into the issue of—if I did the pattern first, I struggled to shift to freeform. When I tried freeform first, I crashed on the pattern. I was about to give up when I opted to mix it up between pattern and freeform. That worked. However, I had several tubes I’d already bent to pattern—which previously when I tried to add the freeform, it was ugly—so since the pattern part was already bent, I thought, I’ll just try and bend the free form elements and see what happens; no expectations. They came out great. This made me realize that my expectations were an obstacle.

My new lessons. Arrive rested with no expectations.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a maker of three dimensional light art that is gestural in form. Neon tubes are my primary media and my themes range from politics to nature. One thing distinctive about my work is that I bend the tubes free form in the air as opposed to a pattern on a work bench. The free form style allows me to create unique movements with the glass.

My current series is the Magical Medicinal Herbs. The idea is that as the ice melts and forests burn, new plants will be discovered that could aid in healing and promoting civil societies as the book Finding the Mother Tree concludes—we are all in this together. Each herb is an invented plant form and the names are made up.

I am an avid gardener and I am inspired by watching and learning from the plants as they grow and face challenges. I embrace the concept that change is constant. Each year the garden issues are different just as cultural conditions are fluid.

I choose to work with neon as my primary media because I like the glow and how the tubes can be manipulated. The mixed media foregrounds and backgrounds allow me to use other media that play with and manipulate the cast light.

Have you ever had to pivot?

My career has been built on pivots. I was told many times to have a game plan but that is hard when you don’t know what is out there. I tried to open as many doors I could find and to explore as much as I could. After studying art, I moved on to journalism and an internship in video production. I ended up working in a small market television production agency which allowed me to do use my art, writing and video skills. Then I started learning how to bend. There was much in common between video and neon—the luminescent light, animation, limited color palette, and wiring things together following a schematic. The big pivot was working with my hands. Much of the video/television process is computer based. Neon requires using your hands to bend tubes to make something. That has been a big challenge. If I was a potter, maybe it wouldn’t have been so challenging but for me, it was a whole new world working with my hands.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I see myself as an investigator of cultural phenomena; one who endeavors, with the aid of observations, history/science/philosophical readings, to arrive at a point of reference that connects the human experience with all of the other parts of the environment.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lindasueprice.com
• Instagram: lindasuepriceneonartist
• Facebook: @lindasueprice.artist
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindasueprice/

Image Credits
Genie Davis Tony Pinto Erin Stone