Vermont Artist Karen Peterson grew up in Escanaba MI, a town on the northern shore of Lake Michigan where the forests and waters informed her early sensibility and, decades later, remain central to her spirit and her aesthetic direction. "I am principally a sculptor of organic forms. I create what my hands see and feel, ignoring fashion and embracing the lessons I have learned from teachers, past masters and a life of conflict and beauty. Sometimes the results, animals and the human figure, are recognizable. Sometimes they are abstract. But always the motive is to create a solid shape of emotional consequence in space, and to give that space new context, new interest, new possibility and new power."