karen wallace

Maryland’s Karen Wallace creates abstract, kiln-formed glass vessels and wall hangings with rich colors, sharp geometric lines and complex designs.

Artist: Born in Danbury, CT, Wallace grew up in Columbia, MD, in the house where she now lives.

She graduated with a BS in computer science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and had a corporate career in software engineering and database architecture.

In 2022, Wallace decided to become a professional glass artist.

Company/studio: Karen Wallace Glass is based in Columbia, MD.

She works out of her extremely organized home studio, which is to say, she no longer has a garage.

In the beginning: Wallace’s journey into glass began with stained glass in the early 2000s.

After a few years, she was feeling constrained by the limitations of flat panes and took a fused glass class at her local community center, where she got hooked on warm glass.

Looking around for instruction, Wallace found a warm glass teaching studio just up the road from her. She did not know at the time, but she had stumbled into Vitrum Studios, which turned out to be one of the preeminent teaching studios in the country.

Wallace had the great fortune of learning there for several years with a variety of domestic and international visiting instructors as well as Vitrum’s delightful owners.

As Wallace’s enthusiasm for glass grew, so did her herd of kilns and demands for electricity.

“A few years in, I had to move out of my historic co-op row home when they decided I couldn’t have a 50-amp kiln,” said Wallace.

Art & materials: Vessels and wall hangings made exclusively of glass. The glass comes in sheets, rods, threads, granules and powders, all of which are used to create different elements. ($500 to $1,300).

The glass work often features swooshes of color, sparkling iridescence, patterned murrine and floating glass powder rings.

“Bursting with color, my abstract glass work centers around maintaining strict geometry and sharp lines in a material that only bonds when heated to a liquid state,” said Wallace.

What’s popular: A recent series of surfboard-shaped wall hangings.

Process: 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. (Note: Cane is a rod of color, sometimes a single color or a complex pattern of multiple colors.)
One of Wallace’s favorite components to create is murrine: tiny glass cylinders which are segments of hand-pulled glass cane. She creates the cane 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 16^th-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. She then uses further heat work to bend it into soft forms.

Watch: https://youtu.be/rjFnBU0tOnQ

Must-have tools: Sandblaster and diamond lapidary wheel. “Couldn’t make work without them,” said Wallace.

Commissions: For a recent commission, a collector wanted concentric ripples.

“After finishing the flat slab of glass containing three crucibles full of hand-pulled cane,” said Wallace. “I cut long strips of furnace insulation to form rings in increasing diameters, then set the glass on top and let it drape over the rings.”

Recent awards/honors: Invited by the Wayne Art Center in Wayne, PA, to participate in its Living with Craft exhibition, which the center runs every 10 years in conjunction with its annual Craft Forms exhibition. Dec. 6 through Jan. 24.

What’s next: A solo show in March 2026 at Chaos Contemporary Craft in Columbus, OH.

Where to buy: