Skin
2019 - ongoing
skin references a history of selkie stories, found in many variations in the coasts and islands of Ireland, Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides and other Scottish isles, Faroe, and Iceland. (Resonances can also be found in the epistemologies of other indigenous Northern cultures, and even in the story of Pania from the East Coast of Aotearoa.)
The story always centres on a sea-dwelling being, often in the form of a seal, who take human form on land with the shedding of their seal-skin (or cloak, or cap, or other form of covering). Most often, this being is a woman whose skin is stolen, forcing her to remain trapped on land - often in an unwanted marriage, and unable to speak. No matter the variation, the story always ends with the selkie returning to the sea.
In skin, I use the metaphor of selkie stories to consider connections between my tūpuna wāhine, ancestral mothers.
I respond to their journeys through and across the ocean, reflecting on the changes they faced and the identities they shed in leaving their homes for different, distant lands.
kahu shoormal (cloak of the water’s edge) (2020). Hand-knit colourwork wool, 35mm film, iPhone video, poetry, hikoi, west-coast ocean swims
“she crossed the moana, motu to motu
i tiihore ia i toona kahu kekeno
and stepped onto the shore
her kaakahu kept close for safekeeping
she grew accustomed to her new form
held in an embrace between maunga and moana
she put down roots”
“she crossed the ocean, held bouyant by the surface swell
shed her skin in each new land she came to
folded it neatly
into a locked chest
(or had it taken from her)
without her skin she could not go back
to the sea”
