Autumn 2008

Made In Vermont: Creative Spark

Kat Clear welds "masculine material" with a feminine touch

By Michelle Edelbaum
Photographed by Daria Bishop

Made in Vermont
As a child, Kat Clear liked to make things with her hands, but she gravitated to sewing and knitting because she didn't think girls should play with hammers and other tools.

"I wish I hadn't been so concerned with that," says Clear, 29, who now owns and operates Kat Clear Works in Metal in Williston.

But Clear made up for lost time. As an art major at the University of Vermont, she dabbled in metalworking and soon got hooked. After graduating, she waitressed to support her need to weld and honed her metalworking skills with Burlington artist Bill Heise and sculptor Kate Pond, with whom she shares a studio.

After a day of physically rigorous welding, Clear's palms and jeans are black with grease and dirt, but delicate diamond studs sparkle in her ears. Her appearance and her art defy the masculine nature of the profession.

"I really love lip gloss and earrings and being girly, but I do love to get dirty," says Clear, a New Jersey native. "Steel is a masculine material. Working with it, I was like, how am I going to bring my sensibility into that?"

Clear's feminine, organic art forms incorporate found objects that she plucks from a heap of rusty car parts, pipes and other metal objects she has amassed. "I just go around to scrapyards and collect things," she says.

Clear welds and shapes her finds — railroad spikes, sheet steel and bolts — to create voluptuous, sensual sculptures of cancan ladies and pinups she dubbed "The Whoopsie!! Grrls." Other sculptures include cloves of garlic, a life-size couch and a 4-foot teapot.

Clear divides her time between these artistic works and her bread and butter — business signage and commissions. Burlington-area businesses with Kat Clear signs include Junior's Downtown, Green Room and Dealer.com. She also created two bike racks for the city of Burlington and crafted the Queen City Crown mounted in Burlington Town Center.

Clear likes the creativity of designing a piece to fit a client's desire, but her favorite project is "The Whoopsie!! Grrls" (shown above, right).

"The coolest thing for me is that I made these sculptures and they interest people," says Clear. "And the ideas, my inspiration, came from within."

View this article as a PDF of the actual magazine pages.