Karen Strang was born in Falkirk, Scotland in 1963 into a family of Polish–Scottish descent. She studied Drawing and Painting at Glasgow School of Art and studied in Warsaw. A BIGOS member, she has explored Polish heritage, identity, feminism, folklore, landscape and social history through painting, installation and performance.
Artist Karen Strang was born in Falkirk, Scotland in 1963 into a family of Polish–Scottish descent. She grew up in various towns and villages across Scotland’s Central Belt, before her parents settled in Tillicoultry when she was 11. She attended Alva Academy, where art teacher Bob McMurray encouraged her artistic ability. From 1981–85 she studied Drawing and Painting at Glasgow School of Art (GSA), graduating in 1985 with first-class honours. Her early distinctions included the GSA Newbery Medal, the Sir William Gillies Travelling Scholarship and a Polish Government Scholarship, awarded through the British Council. The latter enabled her to undertake postgraduate study in painting and printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1985–86. Strang later recalled spending around a year and a half in Poland, visiting churches and museums and becoming involved with underground performance art during the period of Solidarity (The National 2018, p. M20.). Her Polish heritage became an important, if not always consciously pursued, strand in her practice.
After returning to Scotland, Strang was secretary at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow and emerged among a group of young women painters associated with the city in the later 1980s. In 1987 she exhibited during Mayfest alongside Alison Harper, May Maclean and Margaret Hunter in a show at GSA that attracted national attention for its female artists’ engagement with motherhood, religious iconography and mythological imagery. In 1988 Strang received the Edwin Morgan Young Artist’s Prize and served on the Scottish Arts Council Artists Award Panel from 1988–90. During this period she also became involved with BIGOS, a group established in 1986 to bring together younger artists of Polish heritage in Britain, including new immigrants and second-generation artists. She exhibited in Bigos—Six Printmakers of Polish Origin at St Paul’s Gallery, Leeds, in 1988, and later participated in BIGOS projects including the 1989 exhibition at the Castle Museum in Sandomierz and Aliens at Watermans Arts Centre, Brentford, in 1990.
Questions of displacement, identity and inherited memory were central to Strang’s early work. In the 1989 BIGOS catalogue she reflected on faded photographs of her Polish family and on a sense of belonging neither fully to an ancestral past nor straightforwardly to the present. Her grandmother’s move into the family home intensified this awareness through objects connected with her ‘Polishness’. In the 1997 BIGOS exhibition at the Polish Cultural Institute in London, Strang presented Zakonserwowana Rodzina (Family Preserve), an installation about her Polish family, living and dead, in which wax images of relatives were sealed in Polish preserving jars. The work used wax from Warsaw and Lublin, where members of her family lived or were buried, transforming domestic materials into a meditation on memory, migration and continuity. Her practice during the 1990s expanded beyond painting into film, performance and audio-visual installation. Lunacycle, shown at the Cowane Centre in Stirling in 1994, comprised 28 panels based on the lunar cycle, while her contribution to Hanging Together at Stirling’s former Tolbooth that year used slides to commemorate women historically imprisoned there.
Strang has consistently described painting as a political act and a means of bearing witness (The National 2018, p. M20; The National 2020, p. M26). Her later work has brought together expressive figuration, landscape, feminism, folklore, mythology and social history. The industrialised landscapes of central Scotland became especially important: she explored the River Forth, former mining and salt-panning areas, and places associated with the Scottish witch trials, connecting the exploitation of land with the persecution and control of vulnerable people. Collaborative projects such as Voices from Ashes with poet Katharine Macfarlane examined the experiences of women accused of witchcraft, while The Burn and the Tide developed related themes of fear, otherness, gendered violence and historical memory. Strang has linked works, such as the triptych Maiden, Mother, Crone to Polish iconography and to her repeated encounters with Polish religious and folk traditions, while stressing that these cultural references often enter her work indirectly (The National 2018).
Alongside these historically and politically engaged projects, Strang has continued to work in portraiture and landscape. Her 2014 exhibition Illuminations 1874 at the University of Stirling used painting, a miniature theatre, poetry and archival material to investigate Arthur Rimbaud and his possible Scottish connections. During the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, she pivoted from a planned solo exhibition and produced around 50 portraits of frontline key workers in Clackmannanshire, later brought together in an exhibition at Forth Valley Royal Hospital and a charitable book. In 2022 she received the Glasgow Society of Women Artists’ Lauder Award. Other exhibitions include Baba Jaga’s Cookbook: Fairy Tales, Food and Folklore at the Front Room Gallery, Helensburgh (2024); Goddesses I Have Known at Café Gandolfi, Glasgow (2026); and the Glasgow Group Annual Exhibition at the New Glasgow Society, Glasgow (2026). Karen Strang continues to live and work in Scotland. Her work is not currently represented in UK public collections.
Irene Iacono
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Karen Strang]
Publications related to [Karen Strang] in the Ben Uri Library