Past domestic lives can be imagined through their wallpapers, furnishings and fittings from previous generations. My memories of those spaces are fugitive and embroidered like family histories: formal concerns of colour, space and pattern suspend narrative. The paintings look like stories but do not tell them’. - Kate Montgomery.
Kate Montgomery’s interest in textiles, and her studies in Islamic pattern inform the texture and aesthetic of her painting, where patterns and textiles are very much part of the story. She uses geometric principles and Victorian designs to weave through her works, which are small and intensely painted in casein on board. 'Pattern Book', refers to the well-thumbed collection of pattern design books piled up on her studio floor. From Owen Jones' Grammar of Ornament, Eugene Grasset's La Plante et ses Applications Ornementales to early modern designers Enid Marx and Margaret Calkin James.
