The Selkie: Figuring, an Essay
- with Iain Biggs

This paper is a transcript of a hybrid between performance and presentation. It takes an heterodox, polyvocal approach to both research and dissemination through a fusion of art practice and academic discourse, where voices from the audience hold as implicit a role as those of the formal speaker and performing artist.

Our central concern is an exploration of the Selkie, found principally in Scottish folklore but present elsewhere around the British coast, and in Ireland. This creature is an integral part of traditional seafaring culture, able to adapt to both water and land. The aim of this work is to attend to this transformation by reconfiguring various contemporary implications of William Blake’s notion of ‘two-fold vision’ (Keynes, 1956.), a vision that is understood as a prophylactic against ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’ which we equate with the eco-philosopher Val Plumwood’s (2002) notion of ‘ratiogenic monsters’.

The resulting multi-stranded ‘figuring’ juxtaposes poetry, images and exposition to invite its audience and readers to re-imagine notions of identity as these might relate to the emerging Pluriverse. Signification extends from words into image and out again, creating links in perception. The prose, is by one author (Iain Biggs), the poetry and art by the other (Erin Kavanagh). The thinking is permeated through, within and by all three mediums to extend beyond the confines of conventional disciplinary rhetoric (Borgdorff, 2012) in correspondence with (Ingold, 2014: 9) the mythic ontology of a Selkie's being, for "unknown reality works like a stereoscope" (Paz, 19190: 147) and thus no single thread can ever be representative of such tacit dis-articulation.

Taking as one methodological starting-point, the example of Blake’s combination of poetic text and drawn image (Songs of Innocence and of Experience, etc.), together with Plumwood’s call for a convergence between philosophy and the arts, we tension a range of heterogeneous sources focused by the theme of water – understood in Ivan Illich’s sense as: “always dual" (1986:5), "the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination”(ibid, 24).