Contemplating consumption and the things we leave behind

Karolina Gorton was eight years old when The Iron Curtain came crashing down in her native Poland. In the years that followed she studied in Germany, travelled the world, fell in love with a New Zealander, become a mum, and threw herself into art. Karolina talks to Matt Lawrey about her full life and her favourite artwork.

Illustrator and graphic designer Karolina Gorton’s favourite artwork in her Victory home is a photograph of an artwork that she helped to create. In 2008, while living in Wellington, Karolina worked as a volunteer for British artists Heather and Ivan Morison on a 24-hour urban art project that saw wrecked vehicles, discarded furniture and other urban detritus used to build a barricade across a central city street.

Entitled Journée des barricades (Day of Barricades), the installation was built where the seashore used to be prior to the reclamation of land that saw the city expand.

Twenty-one metres long, eight metres high and 10 metres deep, the artwork was part of a year-long One Day Sculpture series and commissioned by the Litmus Research Initiative, School of Fine Arts, Massey University.

Karolina, who was working at Wellington’s City Gallery at the time, was thrilled to help. All the objects were borrowed from recycle centres and the landfill and the artists were very specific about how and where they wanted each piece placed.

“I helped a little bit with putting the pieces on but mostly later I was one of the volunteers looking after it and making sure that nobody vandalised the artwork,” she said. To the volunteers’ surprise and delight, at the end of the project, the Morisons presented each of them with a photo of Journée des barricades as a thank you gift. Karolina likes the photograph’s composition and what you can see when you look at it close up.

“The shapes and elements are put in a beautiful pattern…it’s not accidentally made.”

For Karolina, Journée des barricades has a clear message.

“It’s about consumption and the things we leave behind and what will be left when we are gone,” she said.

Karolina started life in the Polish town of Suwalki. Her family home was a 60-square-metre, twobedroom apartment that she shared with her parents, two siblings and a dog.

“We were lucky. There were families as big as mine living in 36-square-metre apartments,” she said.

“I grew up when Poland was Communist. It was Communist until I was eight. I had a very happy childhood and was probably young enough not to be affected by all the changes.”

The end of Communist rule saw sweeping changes across the country. For young Karolina, one of the most memorable changes was discovering products that she had only seen in Western movies going on sale in local stores. Products like video recorders.

“I remember going with my girlfriends to a shop and it was amazing to see things that we’d only seen on TV,” she said.

Following the fall of Communism, Karolina’s entrepreneurial father became the first surveyor in their part of the country to go into private practice. He also convinced her mum, a dental technician, to go into business for herself. To house this enterprise, Karolina’s father built a little office for his wife in a wardrobe inside the family’s apartment.

“I remember my mum in the wardrobe working, with a little light and a desk, and all the cupboards full of fake teeth, and there would be a customer sitting on a chair outside the wardrobe. It was very different,” Karolina said with a laugh.

At university Karolina did a degree in Culture Studies and won a scholarship to study Art History for a year in Germany.

She met her New Zealand husband, Paul Gorton, 18 years ago on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. After years of living in Wellington, interspersed with extended periods overseas, the couple settled in Nelson to raise a family.

Now a mother-of-two, Karolina spent years as a member of the theatre group Body in Space, studied design at NMIT, and in 2021 created the Blue Stories Project, an exhibition of portraits alongside inspiring stories of parents who have gone through perinatal depression. The exhibition came out of Karolina’s own experience of perinatal depression and toured the country. She also hosts a show on the subject on Fresh FM and is currently mentoring a young woman who is making a theatre piece about perinatal depression in Indonesia, via Zoom.

A proud Victory resident, Karolina sometimes misses the buzz and dynamic nature of bigger cities, but says she has a good group friends here and, overall, loves living in Nelson-Whakatū.

“I love that our kids can walk to their local schools. I love that I can jump on a bike and soon I will be in town, and I love that we can walk over the hill and be at the sea.”