About the Artist

I work in glass and clay — stained, fused, and sometimes both in the same piece — pulling form and color from the places that have shaped how I see.

My love of the ocean took me first to a degree in oceanography and biology, and from there to a career as an environmental attorney, working to protect the wild places I'd grown up loving. Later, while helping to raise my sister's kids, I returned to art on my own terms — first through photography, and eventually into the glass studio where I work now. Each chapter taught me a different way of paying attention: the scientist's close looking, the lawyer's care for what's at stake, the photographer's eye for light and frame. They all show up in the work.

Most of what I make begins on foot, in the backcountry or along the coast. The mountains, shorelines, and wild places I move through — alpine lakes, weathered granite, kelp at the tideline, the particular green of old-growth shade — leave something behind. Light filtered through ice. Refraction in a tide pool. A lichen pattern on stone. The way a glacial stream changes color as the sun crosses it. These observations become the starting point.

Glass and ceramic feel like the right materials for this. Glass holds light the way water does, with a depth and refraction you can't paint. Clay carries the weight and patience of geology. Working between them lets me move between those qualities — the transparent and the opaque, the fluid and the grounded.

I'm drawn to places that haven't been touched by people, and I try to bring some of that quiet, unedited quality into the work itself.

                                                                      ~ Karen