Myth & Memory

45 × 32 cm · 2023

“Selkie” Original painting

Original painting by Alona Petliarska

From the ROOTS series

“She knows two worlds and belongs completely to neither.”

The selkie knows two worlds and belongs completely to neither. In the mythology of the northern sea, she moves between seal and woman — the wild ocean her real home, the human shore a borrowed skin. This painting was made in 2023, before Orkney had fully opened to me, when I was still learning what it means to live between worlds — to carry one homeland inside while standing in another. The figure in the water is both fully herself and becoming. The watercolour is deliberate: fluid, ungovernable, the pigment making its own choices on the paper.