Katherine Gray graduated from the Ontario College of Art and received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. The Los Angeles-based glass artist believes in immersive work that draws on rich glass-blowing traditions, fearless experimentation, and a fascination with glass as both a visual and experiential encounter. Her work ranges from blown glass to elaborate installations of found glass. Gray desires to serve two purposes through her work: to bring beauty into a dire moment in the world and to express her frustration over losing our collective sense of security and well-being.
In 2017, she received the Libenský and Brychtová Award from the Pilchuck Glass School for her artistic and educational contributions to the field. In 2020, she was elected into the College of Fellows. Katherine can be seen in the Netflix series Blown Away as the resident evaluator (season 1 and 2). She is currently a professor at California State University San Bernardino.
Katherine’s glass blower collection at the Corning Museum of Glass, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Tacoma Museum of Glass, among others, have received great attention from the audience. She also did solo shows at Craft Contemporary and the Toledo Museum of Art.
“I use a material that we don’t generally ‘see’: glass. It is often flawlessly clear and colourless, hence invisible in that regard, but also it can be so ubiquitous and banal that it does not register in our psyches either. It is a material that allows us unparalleled connectivity (via smart phones and fibre optics) yet also serves to separate us. To my mind, these two polarities are what set this material apart from so many others, and one of the reasons that I feel compelled to keep working with it as an artistic medium. It is both present and absent, known and unknown, and vacillating between a state of mundane familiarity and otherworldly perfection.” – Katherine
