Artist Gallery

Karen Ehart was born in 1960 and raised in Oregon and Washington. In 1985 her and a partner opened a stained glass studio in Alabama, designing and producing custom work for private residences, churches and businesses. She also found that they did quite a bit of stained glass restoration. During this time, Ehart became drawn to the process of fusing glass pieces together and began incorporating some of this technique into her stained glass work as well as developing a line of jewelry.

In 1990, she returned to the Pacific Northwest where she worked for Savoy Studios. Savoy Studios also is a distributor of dichroic glass (glass coated with metal fibers) and was instrumental in the initial testing of dichroic glass for the art glass industry.

The reflective qualities of dichroic glass allows for a myriad of design possibilities and Ehart soon became intrigued with using it in most of her glass art pieces. The fusing together of abstract shapes of hand cut out pieces of dichroic glass became her focus. Karen Ehart moved to Hawaii in 1992 where she resides today.

Much of her current creations are inspired by the Hawaiian culture from work with petroglyphs to the volcanic textured backing found on many of her one of a kind platters.

ARTIST STATEMENT

"I am drawn to bright, rich colors and the interplay of light both reflected and transmitted through glass and fired metal oxides. Fusing glass is ideal for my design style because a piece can be designed cold on the kiln shelf and then fired. There is no immediate need to finish a piece since it isn't worked into a fragile hot liquid state yet. That means I can continuously experiment with the look of a piece before firing".
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