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.