Coffee & Croissants with Karin Montgomery and Dr Rebecca Rice

Join us for a Coffee & Croissants conversation on The Camellia Society, with artist Karin Montgomery and Dr Rebecca Rice – Senior Curator Art at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

The Camellia Society is not about pretty flowers. The exhibition, and Karin Montgomery’s art more broadly, is charged with the histories of both the camellia plant and the human elements associated with its propagation.

Rebecca Rice’s research on nineteenth-century women botanical artists brought her into contact with Karin, whose work offers a contemporary connection to the botanical arts and crafts made by 18th and 19th century women. She writes: “Women and flowers have long been associated – botanical work being seen as a suitably feminine pastime. They cultivated gardens, collected, observed and drew plants, and incorporated their botanical observations into domestic interiors, adorning all surfaces with floral motifs, from table-tops to drain-pipes . Karin's work is inspired by the dedication of these women to their craft, as well as by the plants and flowers that surround us. Through her work she opens our eyes to the wonder and beauty of the botanical world. In this, she also echoes her predecessors, who, through their work, contributed to the popularisation of botany, offering an important counterpoint to the scientific work from which they were largely excluded.”

Get your $10 ticket to attend this morning talk with a coffee & croissant in hand.

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Karin Montgomery’s exceptional paper craft reflects her attentiveness to the ecology of her garden and immediate inner-city neighbourhood. While her work has its origins in a time of pandemic lockdown and general biophilia, the foundations of her art are in decades of aesthetic experience. For many years she worked as a textile importer, kept bees in her garden and developed an appreciation of botanical art –seventeenth-century Dutch flower painting, Mary Delany’s eighteenth-century ‘paper mosaicks’ and Fanny Osborne’s late nineteenth-century studies of native flora on Aotea Great Barrier Island. Montgomery is interested in the history of plant migration and has researched whaler gardens in Aotearoa and the Chinese origins of ubiquitous local species. She is represented by Anna Miles Gallery.

Dr Rebecca Rice is Senior Curator Art at Te Papa Tongarewa. In her curatorial practice and research, Rebecca is committed to rethinking the legacies of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial visual archive. She brings her historical knowledge to bear when also writing on and speaking about modern and contemporary art. Rebecca embraces a collaborative methodology in her curatorial practice, co-curating exhibitions and co-editing books to work against a single-authored, Eurocentric approach. Recently she co-edited Flora: Celebrating our botanical world (2023), which explored the richness of Te Papa’s cross-disciplinary botanical collections, longlisted for the Ockhams and winner of the 2024 New Zealand Booklovers award for best lifestyle book. She has co-curated many exhibitions, including Te Mata Kāwai Heke o Papa ӏ Arranging Nature (2023), which explored the relationship between art and science, Hiahia whenua ӏ Landscape and Desire (2022), showcasing historical and contemporary landscapes, and Featon’s Flowers (2019), which explored the art of Sarah Featon, a late-colonial ‘flower-painter’.

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Coffee & Croissants is a conversation series supported by our friends at Allpress Espresso and Daily Bread.