With In the Belly, Lindsay Montgomery offers a visceral plunge into the territories of the intimate, delving into family histories, formative experiences, and intergenerational traumas that have shaped her identity. In her recent work, she addresses with unflinching clarity deeply sensitive issues — alcoholism, poverty, rural life, and the enduring legacies of colonialism and white supremacy — that marked her childhood and adolescence in rural Ontario, where her family has been settled for over a century.
She also explores the profound, almost mystical relationship she shares with the wild, an in-between space of refuge where, growing up, she experienced both initiatory and transcendent moments. Her evocative works unfold narratives of inheritance, resilience, healing, and emancipation.
Drawing on the eschatological imagery of the Middle Ages as well as the decorative and pictorial traditions of the Renaissance, Montgomery reactivates the Italian tradition of istoriato (painted history) to craft dense narrative works, where personal mythologies intersect with allegorical representations of contemporary concerns.
To convey the absurdities of our troubled age, the intimate dramas of daily life, and the struggle with inner demons, the artist conjures landscapes of hell, purgatory, forests, and Eden, populated by horned devils, mythological creatures, grotesque figures, and ferocious beasts. In her compositions, paradisiacal visions and infernal scenes coexist, creating a continuous dialogue between enchantment, suffering, and chaos. Through this stark juxtaposition, Montgomery exposes the deep dissonances of a contemporary world saturated with images and information, where the most trivial preoccupations coexist with absolute catastrophe.
In Montgomery’s work, infernal and liminal landscapes become symbolic stages for everyday anxieties, while gardens and forests emerge as havens of freedom, emancipation, and release. In this symbolic geography, nature becomes an anchoring force — a place to regain balance and reconnect with the mysterious and untamed energies of the living world.
The recurring figures of the hermit and the cyclops embody a wild and defiant femininity that rejects the ideals of rationality, progress, and civilization inherited from the Enlightenment. By retreating into the woods, these solitary beings lay claim to a form of intuitive knowledge rooted in the body.
The mouth of hell, depicted as the gaping jaws of a wolf, serves both as a gateway to the beyond and a symbolic threshold between civilization (hell) and nature (paradise). It encapsulates the devouring anxieties of our present time, as well as the muted menace of the inner demons that haunt us.
Infused with fantastical allegories, multilayered symbols, and art historical references, Lindsay Montgomery’s works — imbued with strangeness, chaos, and enchantment — follow in the footsteps of the teeming visions of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where every detail carries a meaning to be deciphered, in resonance with the tensions and anxieties of the contemporary world.
