'Night Drive', Orla Kane, Coloured pencil on paper, 28.5 x 24.5cm, 2023
Blue Shop Gallery presents
‘Fields Adrift’
Orla Kane
11th - 28th January 2024
PV Drinks Thursday 11th January 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
ARTIST TALK between Orla Kane and Ocki at Blue Shop Gallery
12-1pm Saturday 27th January | Everyone welcome
RSVP essential hello@blueshopcottage.com
Gallery opening hours:
Wednesday - Sunday | 11am - 6pm
Orla Kane
Orla Kane (B.1999) is a Scottish artist based in Glasgow. She graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2021 before attending the Royal Drawing School's Intensive Term in 2022. Recent solo show's include Star Face, Boardroom Committee Room, Glasgow, 2023 and Daisy Chains, Stallan-Brand, Glasgow, 2022 as well as being selected for 130 Years of Scottish Society of Artist's Annual Show at the Royal Scottish Academy, 2022-23.
Fields Adrift
“Orla Kane’s new body of work takes us travelling through dream-states of childhood and play, we fly through clouds, over quilted fields, through exploding stars and hearts landing where we were before having collected a little magic dust. Kane plays with the surface from paper to board to canvas with a confidence that is rarely seen, her abstracted surreal compositions remind us who we were when we were young”
- Ocki, Blue Shop Gallery Director
Orla Kane’s practice is a poetic exchange between landscape and recollection. Her landscape subjects are rooted in the rural Scottish Borders where she spent her childhood, remembering the expanse of rolling hills and fields through car, train, and bedroom windows. Dizzying journeys clouded by daydreams alongside inherited mythologies shape the narrative of her work.
Working between drawing and painting, Kane’s layered works carve out landscapes and patterns. Coloured pencil lines weave together to create tapestries that mimic memories of handmade quilted blankets and patchworked hills marked by electric fence.
Ageing with time, her drawings shadow the lifecycle of an idea, creating stories continuously translated and retold. Images are drawn over and over one another as faint iterations of soft lead and pigment are blended into the collage and uncovered months later by rubber or scalpel, cutting into the space to make permanent.
Oil paintings sit alongside drawings; these small works on board have been cyclically in progress since Kane finished art school in 2021, reworked and recontextualised over Kane’s most formative years. Travelling through various lives, these paintings are a sketchbook for developing colours and imagery which follow the evolutions of Kane’s practice.
This new series of work presents a strong sense of seasonal change - a weathered, harsher way of making. These drawings are born from late nights working with glimpses of artificial light illuminating new landscapes. In these shorter days her work reminisces on Italo Calvino’s descriptive universe in Cosmicomics, forging new worlds from dark chasmic days:
‘A meteorite crossed the sky, its trajectory passing in front of the Sun; its fluid and fiery envelope for an instant acted as a filter to the Sun’s rays, and all of a sudden the world was immersed in a light never seen before. Purple chasms gaped at the foot of orange cliffs, and my violet hands pointed to the flaming green meteor while a thought for which words did not exist tried to burst from my throat… Trees of smoke-coloured lava stretched out twisted branches from which hung thin leaves of slate. Butterflies of ash flying over clay meadows hovered above opaque crystal daisies.’
- Without Colours, Italo Calvino, 1968
Squares of colours and patterns are patchworked together on thick paper (sometimes stitched together themselves) which provides a canvas to pull different threads of thought and feeling together. Lighter applications of earlier work collide with confident bursts of colour and line, upheaving fireworks to construct the eternally present celestial and emotional forms of hearts, stars, moons, and flowers. These forms illuminate the hills and fields they originally emerged from as they shape, explore, and distort dynamic and recursive landscapes.
Kane observes the whimsy imagery of the day-to-day into her work, a contrast between doodles and passing time, with the endless subject matter of landscapes informing each work. These distorted and warmly ghosted landscapes crystallise into rough cut gemstone forms as hearts erupt from volcanic lines and flowers bloom into new days.
‘Branching from centre-points, land unfolds like wings. But grids are unpicked, untangled; marks fall away or grow fainter. Edges linger mid-fray, melt and crumble. Spreading colours tuck in lines as they form. Still in suspended moments.’
-Reading Pictures Beneath Quilts, Joanna Holisz, 2023 for Orla Kane
'Window-Mill', Orla Kane, Coloured pencil on paper, 25.5 x 23cm, 2023
Selected Group Exhibitions
‘Works On Paper 5’, Blue Shop Gallery, 2023
Two For Joy, San Mei Gallery, 2023
The Forever Now, The Art Unit/ Art City Works, London, 2023
The Silo Collective, Hampshire, 2023
Society of Scottish Artists 130 Years Annual Exhibition, The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2022-23
New Mythologies, Lunchtime Gallery, Glasgow, 2022
Tangible/Intangible, The Haberdashery, Glasgow, 2022
Salon Des Refusés, The Tub Hackney, London, 2022
Solo Exhibitions
Star Face, Boardroom Committee Room, Glasgow, 2023
Daisy Chains, Stallan-Brand, Glasgow, 2022
Education
The Royal Drawing School, The Intensive Term, 2022
The Glasgow School of Art, Ba Honours (First Class) Fine Art Painting and Printmaking, 2017 -2021
EESAB (Ecole européenne supérieure d'art de Bretagne). 2019-2020
‘Tree Kiss’, Orla Kane, Oil and wax on board, 20 x 20cm, 2023