A Portal to Orkney: Adela Kałuzińska’s First Solo Show at the Pier Arts Centre

03.11.2025

Adela Kałuzińska, 'Portals' (c. 2025). © The Artist.

When entering Adela Kałuzińska’s light-filled studio on the south side of Glasgow’s River Clyde, intricate pencil drawings of geometric fence patterns in Poland, candid photographs of landscape details, jars of jetsam collected on the beaches of Orkney, alongside a pink-hued painting propped on an easel, and a pair of dark teal woodcarvings attached to the wall adorn a corner of the room. All these things give a first glimpse into the working process around what Kałuzińska calls her “landscape portraits,” a term she has used to collectively describe her work, consisting primarily of drawings and paintings, over the years. “The subject matter is often human-made or human-imposed, sculpted by time and nature - therefore, I feel the moments I capture are often more of an unintentional collaboration between people and the environment.”

The remaining empty space in Kałuzińska’s studio is the result of “a really beautiful opportunity” for the young artist. Most of Kałuzińska’s recent work has made its way from her studio in Glasgow to Stromness on Orkney for her first solo show, Portals, at the Pier Arts Centre. When asked how she feels about the exhibition, for which the gallery had approached her late last year, she says: “Seeing art and my art practice as a secondary thing in my life for the past few years because I work full-time, it’s been really affirming that this is still a big part of me and that it’s okay to dedicate time to this. It’s been massively motivating. It gave me a reason to resolve a lot of dormant ideas, as well as discover new lines of inquiry.”

Kałuzińska, who was born in Poland, raised in Orkney and is now based in Glasgow, holds a BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2021. However, her artistic ambitions already emerged when she was a student at Kirkwall Grammar School. “I always wanted to go to art school, so everything I did was towards that. I was basically only in the art department throughout school.” Through the recommendation of her art teacher, Kałuzińska became involved with the ‘Piergroup’, the Pier Arts Centre’s young people’s collective, a “big turning point”. “It was the only place in Orkney that actually had this connection to the contemporary art world. As a young person, when you’re not really close to that and you live in this remote place without access to a lot of culture, that feels like a world opened.”

It feels fitting then that Portals is displayed at the Pier Arts Centre, whose collected works also profoundly impacted Kałuzińska’s art. “I think I realise how subconsciously the collection there has influenced me. I never thought it at the time, but it’s only as I’m developing my practice, I realise that a lot of the themes and the ways all the artists engage with the world that are in that collection, that’s actually part of my process.”

Kałuzińska specifically highlights the work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: “Understanding her lens of the world by seeing how she took something like some rocks or a glacier, and she painted it in so many different ways, and the way she abstracted. Almost looking below instead of ahead.” She adds, “I think my version of it is that everything I paint and draw is an extract from places.”

Two of the artworks currently at the Pier Arts Centre, ‘Temporary Solution’ (2025) and ‘Portals’ (2025), offer insights into this approach. Explaining the motif of ‘Temporary Solution’: “It was a piece of rope. Someone actually used it to patch up a missing bit of railing to make it safer. It’s not particularly beautiful but I think there’s something about these really sharp lines the water. It just really captivated me. I think it speaks to my general interest in things that are temporary.” ‘Portals’, after which the exhibition is named, has deteriorating mountaineering fence posts, specifically their holes, as its subject. “They decorate the mountain in a really strange way, and they've just been abandoned and lost their function. They just exist there in the middle of nowhere.”

Kałuzińska’s work, whose diasporic experience of leaving Poland at a young age to move to one of the remotest corners of Scotland bears such significance to her art and its concern with the universal and specific elements of places, masterfully captures the delicate interrelation, “between time, memory, landscape and cultural identity”.

“It’s just trying to unpick the world around me. It’s about a sense of place and a sense of home, which is confusing when you grow up between two such different places. I’m very obsessed with documenting change. It’s not really from a nostalgic point of view necessarily, but more from wanting to when I’m drawing, for example, fences that are deteriorating or things I find on the beach, or just parts of a landscape that are gradually changing, is to document my particular point of view in that moment in time and my relationship with that place in that moment in time.”

Portals by Adela Kałuzińska, is on display at the Pier Arts Centre from 27 September until 8 November 2025