Coffee & Croissants with Karin Montgomery and Anna Miles

10.30am coffee pouring
11am talk begins

Join us for a Coffee & Croissants conversation on The Camellia Society, with artist Karin Montgomery and gallerist and writer Anna Miles.

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

During this floor talk, you’ll hear more about the complex histories in our own backyards and the development of this body of work – including the nod to Miles Warren’s masterpiece of Christchurch Modernism that situates the show.

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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 and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand.

Anna Miles is an art dealer in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, establishing her gallery in 2003 after deciding it would be more effective to be a champion than a critic. The gallery is located at 10/30 Upper Queen Street where it overlooks the city’s oldest cemetery. Anna’s curated exhibitions include Bespoke: The Pervasiveness of the Handmade (Objectspace, 2006); Vanished Delft: Handmade material culture at The Pah Homestead (2017); Samuel Hartnett: Ex Libris(Objectspace, 2018) and Barbara Tuck: Delirium Crossing (Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Ramp Gallery and Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, 2022).

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

Images:

[Header] Karin Montgomery, Camellia Oleifera, Tea Oil Camellia (detail), 2025, photograph by Sam Hartnett

[1] Karin Montgomery, Camellia Japonica, Common Camellia, Rose of Winter, 2025, photograph by Sam Hartnett

[2] Karin Montgomery, photograph by Sam Hartnett

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