Dreamed House is Kate Montgomery’s first solo exhibition at Long & Ryle. 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.

Her paintings are a look behind the curtains, private moments and domestic quiet. The narrative can be solitary, dreamlike or thoughtful, the subject is often an exploration of personal narratives or inspired by the lives of Kate’s own daughters, occasionally by an unusual historical tale. Childhood features strongly with many paintings depicting a parlour game or a mysterious scene from an imaginative play. There is a suggestion of interior spaces associated with female responsibility, creativity and desire – silent houses with children outside, workrooms, a costume gallery.

These paintings recall the interiors and gardens of seaside holiday houses from my childhood and in Brighton and Hove now. 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)