Karin Gilliam was well known as an artist in Germany, working under the name Karen Wiesmann. She has been awarded four prizes for her work and her pictures have been exhibited in more than one hundred exhibitions both at home and abroad. In addition she has written and illustrated children’s books, a small play and the screenplay for a surreal children’s film called Prinzessin Pferdehaar oder Der Gesang des Leoparden (Princess Horsehair, Or The Song of the Leopard), for which she also painted forty-two pictures, mostly of animals and the jungle. For a long time she lived in Frankfurt, and for seventeen years ran a gallery of contemporary art there, which showed the works of both painters and sculptors.

She herself has won the tender for several art projects organised by the Land of Hessen to produce murals in public buildings.