Imogen Bright Moon, “The Selkie at West Pier”, 2018, handwoven textile in blended rare-breed wools, felted seal mask in grey wools and wild silk by Gladys Paulus (dimensions variable), Francesca Cluney as The Selkie, photo: Michaela Meadow
Imogen Bright Moon evokes the myth of a seal woman through weaving by the sea.
(A message to the reader.)
The Selkie
My skin is velvet brackish pelt
Soft and heavy draping.
My eyes, wet round water-stones,
Blinking through salt-lashes.
The Moon is in my belly;
Sometimes full, most – times dark, always red.
Words have passed my teeth,
In language-song,
In the wild sound of birthing.
(In the fullness of time,
All things become ripe.)
The Selkie: Weaving & The Wild Feminine, 2018
Imogen Bright Moon, “The Selkie at West Pier”, 2018, handwoven textile in blended and handspun rare-breed British wools including North Ronaldsay (dimensions variable), Francesca Cluney as The Selkie, photo: Michaela Meadow
Selkie folklore and motifs are part of traditional storytelling located around the western coastline of the British Isles, featuring heavily in Kernow (Cornwall), the Celtic lands of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and specific island groups, including Orkney and Faroe. Seal (with adjacent mermaid and Melusine) origin myths are found internationally as part of older cultures and First Nations heritages, such as the Inuit Sedna myth. Wherever there is a body of water, there are stories of shapeshifting women, including rivers and inland waterways such as the mermaid-dolphin legends in some traditions of the Southern Hemisphere, focused on the Amazon River Mother of Waters. The deep ocean, in the context of my storytelling and craft, place-holds the Jungian Unconscious and the Christian-Marian tradition of Sainte Maries de la Mer, which is also part of my Romani spiritual ground. Below the surface, we may also find darker representations of the most ancient spiritual wild feminine as nameless vast organic power, nebulous darkness and billowing shadow. As a contemporary therapeutic source, stories and crafted works emerging from water spirit folklore have the innate capacity to communicate ancestral wisdom during (complex and dangerous) feminine thresholds, such as my own experiences of childbirth and early menopause.
Living in the British Isles, surrounded by water, the land here is held within an Avalonian veil of energised, living myth. It is soaked into the roots of trees and spoken by wild birds in old woodland. These woods are now surrounded by housing estates and ever-widening bypass roads, yet I feel this has only served to condense the energy into deep-places, rather than dispel it, where the Spirit of the Place has pulled into boundaries a thick skin of memory. Forgotten rivers, like the local Whalesbone (Wellesbourne) have long since been run underground and out to the English Channel, yet three ancient linden trees still mark the wellspring, the view from my room with a loom, where I blend, spin and weave my gathered raw materials of wools, wild silks and linens, dowsing in my own way the invisible ley that snakes the chalk downland, surely the compressed bones of mammoth antediluvian whales…
The tides of folkloric memory ebb and flow, and, like a particular wise fish, is caught up in the creative nets of artists and craft makers of the age because as long as humanity endures, the force of story will make its presence felt. The function of folklore is to provide instruction and guidance on the human condition and timeless experiences common to all humanity. Living mythos allows us to comprehend certain thresholds and challenges, embody and process them, and then return with insight to be of use. It is this insight, gleaned through remaining teachable to the liminal otherworld, that I bring back into my studio practice. I am now in conversation with a force greater and older than myself, with the power to guide and inspire. Folklore allows us safe passage to encounter The Muse, timeless and restless; the craft maker, as messenger, creates form from invisible substance.
I look for signs of ancient water in the landscape and along the coastline, and I am met with very old folklore; the spirit of that element sends me a story to work with, and as an alchemist, my role is to distil the essence of the spirit, via the medium of craft, as a translator of that watery language. The work is comprised of poetic narratives, motifs and symbols and felt-sense interpretation. However, it is through the disciplined process of craft making in the studio, where material forms take the place of the intangible (or rather absorbs it), a contemporary amulet or aegis is manifest, in materials grown and spun by fellow creatures.
In 2016, after becoming a mother for the second time, I was called to the loom; I became apprentice to both the crafts of spinning and weaving, and also to the deeper intangible craft of story, and all that it contains. The following text is adapted for Garland, taken from the introduction to my catalogue publication The Selkie: Weaving & The Wild Feminine, to accompany my exhibition of the same name at ONCA Ecological Art Gallery, Brighton, in 2018.
Imogen Bright Moon, “The Selkie at West Pier”, 2018, handwoven textile in blended wools and wild silks (dimensions variable), Francesca Cluney as The Selkie, photo: Michaela Meadow
Cape Wrath, Orkney, Shetland;
Storm Imminent. Becoming Cyclonic. Losing Identity by Midnight.
Weaving is by its very nature a medium for storytelling; the harp-like warp forms the structure that suspends the story, sounds plucked by the shuttle’s to and fro, the up and over, down and under the rhythm of heartbeat and breathing. Weaving creates webs of communication, solid and actual, threads of other people’s stories, the history of the craft, the new ways of reaching across time with a very different kind of web. Spinning comes from the naval, yarn winding into an umbilicus of never-ending rope, something to hold onto, something to cut at the right moment. Threads and threads and threads.
For me, the journey into the creation of The Selkie body of textile work (for it is very much representative of the human body, and specifically the Mother Body) started after the birth of my second son in 2016. My first son was born in 2014, and experiencing pregnancy and childbirth twice in short succession was, and still continues to be, a profoundly powerful threshold experience. In many ways, I am still assimilating the physical and mental impact of this transition on a daily basis, and in a very real way, my making holds me together.
In this way, weaving has become my arts practice, and also my personal arts therapy practice, a way to contain, hold and witness the difficulties of becoming a mother, of my induction into the realm of the Mythic Domestic; that place of deep and rich magic, of unfathomable loneliness. This realm is, by its very nature of being a threshold-space, mostly invisible. I have found that space of invisibility (both invisibility from myself and also from the wider world) to be an experience in survival. If I am to survive this, I must make myself visible again.
And so weaving surrogate stone-shaded seal-skins (from rare-breed wools, native to North Ronaldsay, Orkney, blended with wild silks), to remind us of who we are – to remind myself of who I am – began to emerge from the loom. The process of making each one was in itself a labour, a birthing, with struggle and breakdown and a constant re-emerging from the burnt ashes, and in this way, day by day, week by week, and then after one year, the works were finally ready.
The story of The Selkie is a very challenging folktale in its essence. It confronts us with taboos and topics that provoke discomfort; namely those of consent, entrapment, loss of freedom and abandonment, picking up the threads of a very old and very wise story. The nature of this story is not to provide a moral choice but to offer different perspectives, empathy and wisdom in times of darkness…
Imogen Bright Moon, “The Selkie at West Pier”, 2018, found seal skull, feathers and kangaroo-paw flowers, photo: Michaela Meadow
Selkie Midwife
Erupting
Through the skin
Of the unconscious-
A harbor seal
Breaks the surface.
Body of water
Between land
and,
Land.
She is born
Endlessly,
Her invisible world
Full of water
Never still,
Breaking-swell
Digging a pearl –
Dawn treasure.
If we could reach her,
and reach out
To touch her pelt,
Would we then know
How it feels,
To be warm in saltwater,
Peacefully delivered
By the tide,
After fighting for her life.
Imogen Bright Moon, “The Selkie at West Pier”, 2018, handwoven textile (dimensions variable), Francesca Cluney as The Selkie, photo: Michaela Meadow
About Imogen Bright Moon
Imogen Bright Moon (b. 1983, England) is an artist and writer in craft. Imogen is a studio maker in her own materials-led practice, exploring the disciplines of heritage spinning weaving techniques with contemporary innovations in painterly fibre blending to amplify craft as a full-spectrum experiential living heritage, infused with cultural folklore within a therapeutic frame, including Jungian and post-Jungian theories (Von Franz, Baring and Kingsley), with historical-alchemical process references. Imogen is an internationally recognised British Romani artist in textiles, who has previously been awarded DYCP from Arts Council England (2023), Black Tent / Black Sarah (2022) commissioned for Gypsy Maker, supported by Arts Council Wales, and her work Patrin Tapestry IV: Trust (2024) was commissioned by Museums Worcestershire and acquired for the national art collection, accessible via the Art UK archive. Imogen’s published works include case studies and contributions to journals, academic texts, magazine articles, educational resources and poetic anthology, with her own crafts and cultural practice featured in Woven & Worn (Canopy, 2019), Practitioner Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2023) and Wild Yarn (Batsford, 2024). Imogen’s work is represented by The New Craftmaker, and she is a maker-member of Heritage Crafts. Visit www.imogenbrightmoon.com and follow @imogen.bright.moon
Links
The Selkie: Weaving & The Wild Feminine, storytelling event, 2018, ONCA, film by Kim Head;
Archive copies of The Selkie: Weaving & The Wild Feminine exhibition catalogue with story;
