Shoreline …. is a space where human worlds opened out into that which lies beyond their determinations. Can we perhaps think of Fables as a narrative and or a visual or performative staging of this this interface, rather than simply the conscription of other than human actors to tell an all too human story, rather than simply the conscription of other than human actors to tell an all too human story? (Stuart McLean)

Prof Stuart McLean’s talk, ‘Shoreline Creatures: Liminal Metamorphoses and Interworldly Slippage’, given at our very first workshop, in many ways sets the keynote for the ‘Coastal/Oceanic Fables’ section of our online exhibition. His focus is on Orkney and the Shetland Islands, which have produced so many fascinating folktales of seafolks, many of whom, like selkies, cross to the land to become humans. Examining these stories of magical interspecies transformations, shaped by the meeting between the sea and the land, Stuart defines shorelines as a ‘zone of interchange between a more familiar and therefore more readily representable world and the more vague, amorphous powers associated with the sea’s outer reaches and depths’. The fable is a shoreline genre, performatively staging this interchange, as Stuart fascinatingly suggests. His talk beautifully resonates with Susan Richardson’s fable poem ‘The Sack and the Selkie’ which we commissioned for this project, and the ‘Animal Languages’ workshop she conducted on the theme of selkie/human metamorphosis.

Stuart McLean is Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota.  He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Ireland and the Orkney Islands.  His work proceeds from the assumption that that the social and cultural worlds humans often pride themselves on creating are not and have never been exclusively human but are dependent upon and inflected by a multitude of other than human potencies and presences – animals, plants, geological formations, weather systems, and a range of humanly manufactured artifacts fashioned from a variety of materials. In seeking ways to acknowledge and respond to such presences, his work attempts to learn both from anthropology’s encounters with non-Western traditions of thought, in which distinctions between humans and other kinds of beings may be configured in radically different ways, and from art and literature as engagements with the materiality of media (paint, stone, celluloid, the body of the performer, the rhythmic and phonic ‘substance’ of language) that always have the capacity to exceed or disrupt the human projects enacted through them. To this end his work has also sought self-consciously to blur distinctions not only between academic and creative writing (including poetry) but also between writing and other expressive genres (audio-visual and performative).