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 hy

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