We invite you to join us for a special conversation with Karin Montgomery, whose extraordinary works draw together ecology, history, craft, and close attention to place. This artist talk offers a rare chance to hear directly from Montgomery about the ideas, materials, and research that shape her practice — from the quiet life of her garden to the global journeys of plants, and from textile histories to contemporary commissions. It’s an opportunity to step inside the world behind these remarkable works and to engage with the artist in an intimate, thoughtful setting.

Image Credits: Karin Montgomery, Slater’s Crimson China, Semperflorens, Old Crimson China, Rosa chinesis, 2022, paper, wire pigment. Photograph: Samuel Hartnett

Karin Montgomery at work. Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, 2025. Photograph: Samuel Hartnett

Karin Montgomery’s exceptional craft reflects her attentiveness to the ecology of her garden and immediate inner-city neighbourhood. Her art has its origins in a time of pandemic lockdown but its foundations are in earlier aesthetic experience. For many years she worked as a textile importer, kept bees in her garden and developed an appreciation of botanical art including Mary Delany’s eighteenth-century ‘paper mosaicks’ and Fanny Osborne’s studies of native flora made at the end of the nineteenth-century on Aotea Great Barrier Island. Montgomery has researched the history of plant migration, whaler gardens in Aotearoa and the Chinese origins of ubiquitous species. She has received commissions from Ngā Kohina Taonga Whakahirahira Auckland Libraries Special Collections, Te Papa Tongarewa and Objectspace. Her exhibition, The Camellia Society, was first shown at Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2025 before being shown in March 2026 at the Sir Miles Warren Gallery, Ōtautahi, Christchurch. Since 2020, Montgomery has been represented by Anna Miles Gallery.