Karen Wallace works out of a studio at her home in Columbia, MD, with lovely natural light and views of azaleas and birds. Working with warm glass since 2007, her kiln-formed glass vessels in brilliant colors and complex designs are collected nationwide. Glass can be vibrant and full of energy, and there is transformative magic in turning cold, sterile sheets of raw material into the complex motifs Karen favors.
She creates artwork for people who love vibrant color and luscious lines, and crave tangible art with shape and heft.
Karen's Process and Techniques
Crammed into her studio are the tools of the glass trade: six kilns, a sandblaster, a tile saw, and two diamond lapidary wheels, as well as nearly two tons of sheet glass.
Karen's techniques range from simply cutting the sheets and stacking them in geometric patterns to harnessing the liquid properties of glass to create rippling organic flows and complex patterned cane at molten temperatures.
In this photo, Karen engages in one of her favorite techniques, pulling molten glass out of the bottom of a 1500°F kiln. She creates a pattern of stacked sheets of glass inside a kiln with a hole in the bottom, and once the glass is hot enough to reach the consistency of taffy, she slowly extrudes it in rods with a pair of pliers.
"Red Skies at Night"
Here, Karen Wallace is snipping the rods of glass cane into cross-sections called murrine.
She places hundreds of murrine one-by-one onto a ceramic shelf -- sometimes at random, sometimes to form a pattern that represents the chronology of the pattern of stacked glass as it emerges in the rods. The subtle bloom of the murrine as they settle and expand in a second trip through the kiln is reminiscent of a bed of sea anemones.
Once the elements have been placed together, Karen fuses them into a solid mass. She shapes the resulting disc with diamond-plated saws and lapidary tools, and uses further heat work to bend it into soft forms. Elements of a finished piece undergo several firings on their way to the final artwork.
To make Red Skies at Night, the french vanilla and steel blue murrine were sandblasted, ground to fit on a diamond lapidary wheel, and then combined with steel blue and red sheet glass under a layer of wispy cloudy glass.
"Red Skies at Night" is currently available at the Artists' Gallery. To follow more of Karen's art practice please see her website or follow her on instagram @karenwallaceglass.