Contemporary Glass Artist Spotlight: Karen LaMonte

Karen LaMonte is an American artist whose work explores themes of embodiment and identity, persona and personality, the social lives of women, and the role of the body in the human condition. She is best known for her life-size cast sculptures and monotype prints, using the principal mediums of glass, bronze, and ceramic.

Born in New York City in 1967, LaMonte studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and began working in glass sculpture soon thereafter. Through a fellowship at the Creative Glass Center in New Jersey, she began designing blown glass puppets and marionette figures.

In the late 1990s, LaMonte earned a Fulbright Fellowship to continue her exploration of large-scale glass casting in the Czech Republic, where she first developed the idea for her full-scale dress sculptures, and where she continues to live and work.

LaMonte’s ethereal dress sculptures are some of the finest examples of the potential of contemporary glass art. These life-size cast glass artworks appear to flow and drape like real fabric while suspended, unworn, in mid-air. Though the glass, containing 70 to 74% pure silica by weight, is heavy and grounded, the dresses float like ghosts — translucent, pendulous, airy.

These dresses, on display in museums around the world, are a part of LaMonte’s overriding themes of the power of clothing in shaping our identities. According to her biography, she is interested in “probing the disparity between our natural skin and our social skin, clothing which we use to obscure and conceal, to protect the individual and project a persona.”

Rather than employing typical free-blown or mold-blown glassblowing techniques, LaMonte’s newer works are created through glass casting, whereby molten glass is set upon a mold to solidify. The process can take up to nine months. In order to achieve the full size of her dress pieces, LaMonte often creates three separate casts, as most kilns are not large enough to produce a single cohesive work on her scale.

Most recently, LaMonte’s work has shifted to Eastern influences, especially in exploring Japanese fashion and beauty ideals. Along with Western-style dresses, LaMonte now frequently casts kimonos as part of her ongoing foray into the possibilities of glass as an expressive form of sculpture.