Karen Wallace

Often featuring hundreds of strips of glass or sections of hand-pulled cane, my work is time-consuming and meticulous.

Everything starts with sheets of colored glass. 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. 

One of my favorite components to create is murrine: tiny glass cylinders which are segments of hand-pulled glass cane, which I create by heating a stack glass to 1500 degrees in a kiln with a hole in the bottom, then pulling it into rods while molten in a modern-day adaptation of the 16th century techniques of the Murano glassmakers.

Once elements — sometimes hundreds of them — have been placed together and fused into a solid mass, I shape it with diamond-plated saws and lapidary tools and use further heat work to bend it into soft forms.