Hanna Tuulikki’s film Seals’kin is a sonic and choreographic meditation on loss, longing and transformation. In Scottish folklore, mythical seal people known as selkies are said to shed their sealskins to step out of the sea as humans. The sealskin is essential to the act of transformation, as a selkie may end up trapped on land in human form if their skin is lost or stolen during a visit to the human world, without being able to return into water. In the water, a selkie may avenge the killing of another seal by overturning a seal hunter’s boat. But a kinder selkie might instead help a lost sailor in a storm, giving them shelter in their underwater realm. Such stories of selkies, along with seal-like melodies and seal-calling songs, were passed down through generations.

Some believed seals and selkies carried the souls of the dead. Thus, singing to or with seals may have once nurtured a felt connection with the dead, offering ways to cope with grief and giving shape to collective and personal sorrow. Filmed in coastal Aberdeenshire at the mouth of the River Ythan, where hundreds of seals rest on the estuary banks, Seals’kin explores what it means to “become-with-seal.” Drawing on myths of human–seal hybridity and old musical practices, Tuulikki offers an alternative mode of mourning personal and ecological loss through folkloric coping mechanisms of grief.

Seals’kin is presented as part of the year-long film programme How to Reappear, curated by Indranjan Banerjee.

About the artist
Hanna Tuulikki is British-Finnish artist, composer, and performer based in Scotland. Her work explores our connection with the more-than-human world. Practising across sound art, music, visual art and live art, she blends sonic composition with ritual forms and visual elements – including costume, choreography, and graphic scores – to tell ‘stories of re-worlding’ through immersive installation, moving image and live performance. Tuulikki’s work has been commissioned and presented by organisations across visual, musical and performing arts in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia, India, and the Middle East, including Folkestone Triennial (2025), Biennale of Sydney (2022), Helsinki Biennial (2021), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016) and Edinburgh Art Festival (2015).

About the film programme
How to Reappear presents a series of films that explore what it means to be remade, to survive and to persist in altered forms. The works draw viewers into intimate encounters with transition and transformation, revealing the intensity and tenderness of these processes as well as their moments of shock and disorientation. In these stories, flesh, terrains and topographies become sites where transformation unfolds. They underscore the fragility of bodies and landscapes as myth, illusion and virtuality shape how change is imagined and endured.

Image credit: Hanna Tuulikki, Seals’kin (still), 2022, Single-channel colour video, 16:9, stereo sound, 19 min. 15 s.