‘The Selkie Is At The Door’ is a visual exploration of identity and transformation, seen through the lens of the myth of the Selkie woman. In many British coastal cultures there is the story of the Selkie, who sheds her seal skin to bathe on the rocks when she is spotted by a fisherman who falls instantly in love with her. He steals her skin and hides it - thus forcing her to remain in human shape - and takes her for his wife. Many years later one of their children reveals the location of her seal skin, and the Selkie woman takes it and returns to the sea from which she came.

To be a mother is to have to cast aside so much of our identity. Here the seal skin is not stolen by a man but by a culture which expects mothers to perform as martyr and maid, to put away our time and ambitions, to make ourselves kind and easy and smooth as a tide-worn pebble. In losing our wildness, our jagged edges, we become less than ourselves. But the two identities - mother and monster - simply cannot exist at once, in the world that we have built: we cannot walk on land and on sea.

The piece is made of a length of mulberry silk velvet which has been torn and etched with devoré paste so that it is semi-transparent in places. When worn against the skin, the body can be seen in places, evoking the sense of transformation between two very different states. It has been sprayed with acrylic paint, embroidered with beads, shells, sequin and thread to give it the impression of having been cast aside - perhaps in the stagnant water of a rock pool - for many years.

Made during an artist’s retreat on a remote British island in October 2024, I collaborated with Walls Trimble, a fantastic Brooklyn-based photographer, on a series of photos which very much felt like the culmination of this piece. We discussed at length how best to photograph the Selkie skin - I felt strongly that I wanted the piece to be clutched to a naked body but not worn in any traditional way, and not to look like a glamourous, beautiful image - and decided at last that showing it against my post-partum body would be the finishing piece of the story.

There are very few accessible beaches on the island, which ruled out a dramatic shoot on the rocks or the pebbled shoreline. Instead we decided to showcase the Selkie in the house, the kitchen, or at the door, to juxtapose the untamed with the domestic.

Photographs copyright Walls Trimble.