Katherine Daniels explores the archetypal ideals of gardens in paradise through beaded mixed-media sculptures, installations, and public art. She creates immersive environments that heighten awareness of natural structures and through adornment and repetition her work is a meditation on our relationship to paradise as a setting physically and emotionally. Daniels’ body of work has an iconographic facet that pays homage to forms in nature that are potentially going to expire over time due to human neglect towards the environment.
Daniels grew up in West Virginia watching her mom knit and sew and incorporated both as well as beads into her paintings. She also employs beads to reference prayer, contemplation, craft, and Hindi and Yoruba cultures, and she forms the beads similar to a painting in three dimensions. Daniel’s states “These paradisiacal gardens represent the human need to counter our acts of destruction by creating and cultivating beauty.”
Daniels recreates a metaphorical garden out of discarded materials such as repurposed items, recycled materials, sewing notions and with these materials performs a ritual that reconsiders the repurposed and discarded and ideals of beauty in nature. Her installations are meditations on beauty, wonder and reference ornamental styles such as quilts from Daniels Appalachian roots, Islamic and Asian textiles as well as the Sistine Chapel and Versailles. From disparate elements and materials Daniel creates forms that are lush, pleasurable and that highlight the riotous and essential aspects in nature and the garden.
Ms. Daniels is currently exhibiting the site-specific installation Ornamental Paths at Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx, NY as part of the 2012 Claire Weiss Emerging Artist Award. In December she will be installing the fence weaving St. Nicholas Park Mesh in St. Nicholas Park in Harlem, New York with the support of a LMCC, MCAF grant. She has also been awarded AIM 30 participation at the Bronx Museum, a PS. 122 Project Studio, a Artist-in-Residency at the Henry Street Settlement, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation The Space Program grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. She holds a B.F.A. in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a M.F.A. in Painting from Johnson State College. She was raised in Huntington, West Virginia and now lives and works in New York City.
