Karen Wallace

A software developer and database architect by training, Karen Wallace’s journey into glass began with stained glass in the early 2000s. After a few years feeling constrained by the limitations of flat panes, she took a fused glass class at her local community center and was hooked on warm glass.

As Wallace explores new techniques and constructions, her love for riotous color in her work never changes. Often featuring hundreds of strips of glass or sections of hand-pulled cane, her work is time-consuming and meticulous.

One of Wallace’s favorite components to create is murrine: tiny glass cylinders which are segments of hand-pulled glass cane, which she creates 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, Wallace shapes it with diamond-plated saws and lapidary tools and use further heat work to bend it into soft forms.