Katherine Daniels explores the archetypal ideals of gardens in paradise through beaded mixed-media sculptures, installations and public art works. 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 physical and emotional setting. Daniels body of work has an iconographic facet that pays homage to natural forms in nature that may expire over time due to human neglect towards the environment.

Daniels grew up in West Virginia watching her mother knit and sew and incorporated both, as well as beading, into her paintings. She also employs beads to reference prayer, contemplation, craft and Hindi and Yoruba cultures, forming the beads similar to a painting in three dimensions. Daniels 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, repurposed or recycled materials and sewing notions, and with these materials performs a ritual that reconsiders these previously discarded pieces, together with the ideals of beauty in nature. Her installations are meditations on opulence and wonder, referencing 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 Daniels creates forms that are lush, pleasurable, and that highlight the riotous and essential aspects of nature and the garden.

About the artist: 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 P.S. 122 Project Studio, an 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.

About the Gallery: Station Independent Projects organizes exhibitions and events with a focus on artist advocacy. Station Independent Projects specializes in discovering new emerging and mid-career artists who are not represented by galleries and organizes shows to connect artists to broader audiences. Before opening the gallery in the Lower East Side, Station Independent Projects had organized exhibitions in the New York City area for over ten years with numerous New York galleries, art fairs and non-profits.