Written by Sara Debevec
Photographs by JL Cederblom
"This can kill you,” Olivia Steele points to a high voltage bombarder located right next to her kitchen table, as she walks me through the instruments and materials she uses to bend glass and make her neon word sculptures. This is where the magic happens and in the glass community it’s called the platform, but usually it doesn’t just causally sit in someone’s living space. Among the welding instruments, long thin tubes of glass and a pumping station is a vintage mercury bottle from the 1960s - a sentimental gift from one of her teachers. “This too can kill you,” she adds. As I look around the beautiful, well-lit gallery, that is her home, I can’t help but feel safe among her words that envelop the space like moonlight.
Steele is an internationally recognized conceptual light artist specializing in neon glass and text-based art. She has a studio in Berlin, Mexico City and Los Angeles, and from these three cities she supplies the world. She is also known for her public interventions that have gained widespread attention. From historic landmarks and facades in London to beach barren roads in Mexico to the skylines of America, her illuminating sculptures critically engage with the space and the viewer. Most recently she has been setting her words on fire in her art park at Burning Man that inspired her permanent metal word sculptures filled with propane.
Glass bending is a dying art because signage used to be all neon and now it is mostly LED. It is a very delicate process that requires patience. “You also have to remember that things break while you are in the process of creating, so it teaches you temperance and sometimes you just have to stop,” she says. “Working with glass, working with fire, working with electricity. It's all a metaphor - at least for me. I get burned, I get scraped, I get electrocuted. It happens, you know, but it's like mad science and it's taught me a lot about me. It’s a meditation in a way, because you’ve got to be present,” adds Steele, whose work I recognized first at the rooftop of Petit Ermitage Hotel in West Hollywood. A purple neon sculpture that said “See you on the other side…” I don’t know if it was the words or her handwriting, or the warmth of the neon that drew me in, but I felt like from that moment on we had created a bond.
"It teaches you temperance
and sometimes you just
have to stop."
Now as we sit on her sofa, under the pink neon sign that says “This is where it gets interesting,” she tells me that installing her work is half of the art. “One thing that sets my work apart from any other neon artist is the precision and the detail of installing, and where the bends go, and how to hide the wires, because it comes in pieces,” she claims. She doesn’t want to deal with any repairs. It has to be done perfectly. “Some things are quotes and some are from me. Paradise is where I am, that's a quote by Voltaire, Everything you can imagine is real is from Picasso. Everything you need is Inside you - it’s kind of paraphrased from Rumi. It's a mix. And it's just like, you know, I don't own those words, but I'm bringing them out, to get them out. Because they don't need to be stuck in a book. That’s the beautiful power of art, it’s to put them in a different form,” continues Steele.
She was born in Nashville, Tennessee to a mother who was a country music singer and father who was a businessman. Her mother was like the Martha Stewart of Nashville, hosting dinner parties all the time. She also had a great eye for interior design and was extremely crafty. “My dad was a businessman, but also really a philosopher and a student of divinity. He always had a book in his hand, read every sign. He was just, like, thirsty for knowledge. And he would always have these one liners and these truisms for everything that would just shut me up,” says Steele. This was her introduction to these profound words of wisdom and empowerment that have been so prevalent in her work. What’s her favorite truth? I ask - “Trust The Process” she says as she opens her hand to show me she even has it tattooed on her wrist in her handwriting.
Growing up she thought she was going to be a professional horseback rider and she went to boarding school for that. On the third week of the third year of her boarding school she got kicked out for breaking five major school rules in one day. Shortly after she got sent to a reform school known as the wilderness program called Second Nature in Utah that changed the course of her life. For the next 49 days, everything was taken away from her including her shoes at night. “You don't have a tent, you have a tarp that you're backpacking every day with your pots, with your pans, with water, and you don't eat hot food until you can learn how to bust an ember with a bow drill set. So…survival. You’re taken out of this world, and you're in survival school. And there's therapy twice a week, and you're in a group, and you have to, like, earn your way up through the levels. It’s super fascinating and very effective. My parents had no idea what I was really up to,” she recalls, “but it was what essentially got me interested in studying psychology.”
After completing her high school studies in Switzerland, she graduated from University in Paris with a degree in Visual Communications and Psychology. It wasn’t until she pursued a masters degree in London in lighting design that she found her calling in multi-disciplinary art. Over the years she has also branched out into film, fashion and product design and even has her own line of merchandise under the Steele The Show brand, where she offers stamped jewelry, scarves, towels, blankets, books, handbags and other creations.
“Love has brought me to all the cities that I've lived in,” she shares, while petting her sweet cocker spaniel Patron. “I mean, everything has ended. But I stayed. You know, something's got to bring you there…” Her artistic journey started when she co-founded Pret A Diner with her then German boyfriend. It was an immersive dining experience in surreal locations with Michelin star chefs, an art gallery and a shop. “Our first one was in Berlin, in an old coin factory, which was abandoned. And that is where I have my studio now, I never left.” This mobile pop-up dining model was her first gallery too, where she started installing her work. Over the next three years she designed 14 restaurants and numerous temporary environments.
Public art is her favorite part of what she does. “It’s that ability to touch people that you’ll never meet.” Her dream is to create a piece of art that’s visible from space, get a big piece of land somewhere and create a piece that everyone can understand - a symbol. As she grows, she wants to work less and do more, create art on a larger scale and raise the vibration in the collective consciousness through short punctuated truths and signs. If you ask me, she is already doing that. -