Layers of Light by Katherine Warinner
Saturday, September 5 - Sunday, November 8, 2026
Upcoming Programming:
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Join us for the Opening Reception of Katherine Warinner's Solo Exhibition: Saturday, September 5, 2026 from 3-5PM | FREE
RSVP to the Opening Reception on Eventbrite here!
Cura Contemporary is thrilled to present Layers of Light, a solo exhibition by Bay Area-based artist Katherine Warinner. The show features brightly layered prints on paper that reference the natural world, where light is the star of the show. Katherine's art is inspired by a love of landscape, design, and natural processes; she seeks to illuminate and elevate the timeless beauty of the natural world. Her prints-which are a hybrid of painting, printmaking, digital imagery, and photographic
process-reinvent traditional forms of printmaking through modern technology.
Layers of Light features works from Warinner's ongoing Branches series, which began during the isolation of the COVID pandemic, when she spent time in her backyard, noticing the recurring sensation of looking through foliage toward a lit clearing beyond it. Shadow and light play key roles in Warinner's work. "I love the sense of the light pouring through," Warinner states. "The light is broken into a lot of different small patterns by the leaves that create a field of texture. This shifts your awareness from a linear to a wider perception." That wider perception, called "field awareness," moves attention away from one fixed viewpoint into an open, all-at-once perception of the whole surrounding environment. Warinner also brings a quiet stillness to her work, striving to hold the meditative feeling of being present in nature within each print. It's the same quality she hopes viewers carry away with them: a felt sense of that space, and a reminder of the natural forces we're all part of. Artist Bruce McKaig has described Warinner's process-which moves from digital photography, to laser-cut wood templates, to multiple passes of ink on paper-as a method whose results are never fully predictable and can't be undone once set in motion. Photography plays a role throughout Warinner's process, but only ever as a starting point. Fittingly, the word "photography" comes from Greek roots meaning "light" and "drawing," which is precisely what Warinner is doing: drawing with light. As McKaig put it, she works invisible qualities such as feeling, atmosphere, and the particular quirks of nature into the surface of her prints.
Katherine Warinner's work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in private and corporate collections, including Kaiser Permanente (California), Stanford Healthcare (Palo Alto, CA), and Sutter Health (Sacramento, CA). She has held artist residencies at Kala Art Institute and In Cahoots Residency, where she produces her large-scale works on paper, and was recently awarded the Denis Diderot Grant to attend a residency in France at Château d'Orquevaux in 2025.
