Orla Kane

Artist Profile

Orla Kane (b. 1999, Melrose, Scotland). Lives and works in Glasgow.

Orla Kane makes drawings and paintings of imagined landscape. Her subjects come from the hills and fields of the rural Scottish Borders, where she grew up, remembered as they were seen from car, train and bedroom windows. She works in coloured pencil, soft pastel and oil, building each image slowly from a loose woven grid until shapes settle into hills, fields, water and weather.

The drawings are made in layers over long periods. Coloured pencil is laid down, rubbed back with an eraser or cut into with a scalpel, then drawn over again, sometimes months later. Sheets are hand torn, patched together from squares of colour and at times stitched with cotton thread, so that the surfaces resemble quilts or fields divided by fencing. Her oil paintings, on board, linen, hessian and canvas, are reworked over several years, cut back and rebuilt in bright glazes. A recurring set of motifs sits across the landscapes: suns, moons, stars, hearts and flowers. In Landslides (2026) she worked on larger panels for the first time, suspending oil paint in marble dust and pouring oil across the surface to dry in ripples.

Kane graduated with First Class Honours in Fine Art, Painting and Printmaking, from The Glasgow School of Art in 2021, after a period of study at EESAB in Quimper, France, and attended the Royal Drawing School’s Intensive Term in 2022. She is represented by Blue Shop Gallery, London, where she has held three solo exhibitions: Fields Adrift (2024), More Moons Than Suns (2025) and Landslides (2026). She has exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and Tremenheere Gallery, Cornwall, and received the Paint Box Art Classes Award at the Society of Scottish Artists Annual Exhibition in 2022. In 2026 she took part in a Royal Drawing School residency at Dumfries House.