BBC Orkney — Interview & Feature
Press · November 2025

BBC Orkney — Interview & Feature

In November 2025, BBC Orkney broadcast a feature on Alona's practice and the Milestones exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre. The piece was part of BBC Orkney's ongoing coverage of the island's creative community and of Ukrainian artists living and working in Scotland since 2022.

The interview explored the experience of making art while displaced — how Slavic mythology functions not as nostalgia but as a living imaginative resource, and how the Orkney landscape became not a substitute for Ukraine but a genuinely new territory that changed what was possible to paint.

On identity and painting

"I came here following something I didn't have a name for yet. The landscape answered questions I hadn't known I was asking. The mythology I carry from Ukraine — the rusalky, the berehyni, the wild feminine that runs through Slavic folklore — found something in the Orkney stones and sea that recognised it. Two very old worlds met in my studio. That's what the paintings are."

The broadcast feature aired on BBC Orkney radio in November 2025. A written version of the interview remains available on the BBC Orkney website.

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