Opening in January 2026 is Weather, Window, Echo, Hum by local artist Katherine Pickering!
Weather, Window, Echo, Hum brings together two interconnected series: Hum, small oil paintings on linen, and Weather Patterns, sewn India ink paintings on cotton. Both series are grounded in gestures of care, repetition, and renewal. Through processes of layering, sanding, cutting, and sewing, the work approaches abstraction as a material practice attuned to time, labour, and the quiet rhythms of domestic life.
In Hum, small geometric abstractions painted at the kitchen table are repeatedly sanded and repainted to reflect sites of extractive industry reclaimed by weather and time. Each Hum painting develops over months, the resulting surfaces retain faint residues of earlier images, registering the passage of time and unfolding creative intention. This deliberate slowness becomes a form of contemplation, a counterpoint to the speed of contemporary life.
The small scale of the Hum paintings fosters intimacy. Their modest dimensions invite viewers to draw close. This intimacy extends to the context of their making: painted at the kitchen table, and stored on the windowsill to dry, the paintings were lived with, observed, and reconsidered as part of daily routines.
Seeking to expand this geometry of care, Weather Patterns links abstraction to quilting and hot summer days. Wet, ink-painted cotton is flash-dried in the Okanagan sun, freezing the motion of ink mid-flow. Cut up and reassembled into geometric compositions that echo the artist’s mother’s quilt making. Across both series, abstraction becomes an embodied, iterative practice that values intimacy.
This exhibition opens January 16th 2026. Stay tuned for more information and reception details!
Katherine Pickering is a visual artist based on syilx territory in Kelowna, British Columbia. Rooted in material experimentation and the poetics of abstraction, her paintings explore the intersections of drawing, sculpture, and textile, emphasizing the material and conceptual fluidity between mediums. Her work has been shown across Canada, the United States, and internationally, including at the Kelowna Art Gallery, the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Fort Gallery, and Artcite Inc., with an upcoming presentation in Hyères, France. Pickering holds an MFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and a BFA from UBC Okanagan, where she teaches in the Department of Creative Studies.