Karen Karnes has been working in clay for over sixty years and is a studio potter in the purist of sense. Within this time she has become an amazingly influential ceramicist in the field. She did not start off wood firing. Her journey in clay has been strong and continually with each new form and way of firing. Karen's work has progressed from functional to her later work being more sculptural. Karen started off making molds it was not till she spent some time in Italy in the early 1950's did she first start to throw. She attended college at the New Jersey College of Industrial Art in Newark in the late 1940's. After returning back to the United States from Italy Karen started her graduate work at Alfred University, but after going down to Black Mountain College in North Carolina for a summer, she never went back to Alfred. In 1967 she started to salt-glaze after taking a workshop at Penland School for the Crafts in North Carolina. That is what launched her into international recognition. After moving to Vermont in the late 1970's she began to wood fire. This was partially due to the abundance of wood in the area in which she lived. As a result of firing in a larger kiln her work has also grown in size. Karen has received numerous awards for her accomplishments one them being the Artist's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976 and again in 1988. Her work is widely exhibited and can be found in galleries and musuems. There was a film recently made about her life called "Don't Know, We'll See: The Work of Karen Karnes" by Lucy Massie Phenix.
www.karenkarnes.com/index.html
Sources:
Garth Clark, 2003. Karen Karnes Retrospectively. Lucy Massie Phenix. 29 Jan. 2010 www.karenkarnesfilm.com/docs/KKRetrospect.PDF
