Kate Montgomery
Painting Apron
Casein
2021
‘Painting Apron’ retrieves a personal history of trying to continue to paint in the first two decades of the twenty first century with three young daughters. My career went into half life. The impossibility of buying time to paint when there is no certain financial outcome to pay childcare and the entrenched attitudes of the gallery system to women artists with children (push a buggy in, and you become irrelevant).
Post feminism and the rise of ‘raunch culture’ represented by the pole dancers was a distraction in my opinion. I needed to re- set my former identity by painting some of the day, retrieve and build my career, and demonstrate myself as viable outside my role as parent to my daughters. The ongoing lack of affordable and/or cheap state childcare is the UK is a national disgrace. Childcare provision and costs are more onerous and devisive than ever.
