Semi-Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery

Karen LaMonte is a contemporary American artist known for her sculptures, particularly her sculptures of life-size dresses made from cast glass. She studied at Rhode Island School of Design and later studied at the Applied Arts Academy in Prague, Czech Republic, after being awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. She created her first glass dress sculpture, Vestige, while she was studying in Prague. 

Semi-Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery is part of a series titled Absence Adorned. This series includes a variety of sculpted glass dresses in different poses. While the dresses seem to mold to the shape of a human, the human figure is absent.

The sculptures are at once intensely physical – muscles and flesh strain against the clinging fabric – and yet insubstantial; the figures are absent, implied only by the shapes pressing against the clothing.

Karen LaMonte

LaMonte uses the technique of lost-wax casting to create her glass sculptures. This technique is traditionally used to create metal sculptures, but LaMonte uses it to create cast-glass works. First the artist creates a model of the dress using wax and fabric. She then uses the model to create a mold. Finally, the wax is melted out of the mold and replaced with melted glass. 

The glass moves slowly, and it takes quite a while to fill the mold . . . Iron would be cast in 10 minutes maximum, the glass will stay up at the casting temperature for days, because the forms are very deep and there’s a lot of detail and the material just needs to flow slowly in there.

Karen LaMonte

There are similarities between LaMonte’s work and 17th-century baroque statues, like those made by the sculptor Bernini. Both her sculptures and Bernini’s statues use draped forms to highlight the shape of the human body.