Oxygen, Orkney, and Ozone: The Oceanic Works of Margaret Tait

Abstract

Using a lexicon offered up by the “Blue Humanities,” this thesis situates itself in the midst of the littoral zone of the Orkney islands. When brought together, the films and poetry of twentieth-century Orcadian Margaret Tait construct a composite image of life on the edge of the land and sea where a “littoral poetic subject” engages with the materiality and fluidity of the shoreline. This project, in an effort to see Orkney, allows the formal constraints of poetic subjectivity, narrative, and the gaze of the film camera to show a depiction of islandness that resists categorization and containment, producing a notion of an Orkney whose fluid, thalassic margins allows for infinite possibility and interconnectivity.