The Boundary Feels Invented with Guen Montgomery

The Boundary Feels Invented with Guen Montgomery

Duration: 00:50:29 | Recorded on April 21, 2026

In this rich and wide-ranging conversation, we sit down with Guen Montgomery — artist, printmaker, and Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — whose work is as tender as it is conceptually rigorous.

Guen takes us back to her childhood in rural Scott County, Tennessee, where she grew up surrounded by her mother and extended family's intense, complicated relationships with objects — hoarding, coveting, collecting. She reflects on how that early world quietly became the emotional and conceptual heart of her practice, and what it means to work across printmaking, performance, and sculpture.

Then we turn to motherhood and the ideas at the core of Guen's practice — that her work thinks by way of touch and pressure, both as printmaking process and as a somatic search for connection and a body-boundary. Having a baby, she tells us, was confounding: her daughter's DNA got mixed with hers, revealing that her person is porous. There was once no delineation between her body and her mother's; later, her body contained the genetic material for her daughter's. She still doesn't feel fully separate from either of them. When she sits with that long enough, the boundary between any body and her own starts to feel invented — and so do the boundaries around objects and environments. It's only by pushing against another person or thing through touch that she can feel the edge. Printmaking, she says, is another way of pushing to find it.

Guen also speaks movingly about caring for her own mother, and what it means to occupy that middle place in a matrilineal line — the apex between the woman who raised her and the daughter she is raising. It's a position that is at once logistical and profound, and one that runs quietly through everything she makes.

We also get practical: how Guen balances teaching, making, and exhibiting, and what restoration looks like when caregiving runs in every direction.

This one is for anyone who has ever felt shaped by the objects around them, uncertain where their body ends and another begins, or who is trying to make meaningful work from the complicated, specific place they come from.

Guen Montgomery's two-person exhibition “Pressure and Touch” was featured Spring 2026 at Kinhouse Gallery in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Check out more of Guen’s work on her website and follow her on instagram @guenstagram