The Fifty Fifty presents, Seal-Mara, in collaboration with The Bonnie Mccomb Kreye residency and funded by The BC Arts Council. Seal-Mara (Intertidal) shadows transitional bodies through life-death and shape-shift as intimate, metaphysical and material relations to the intertidal zone. From the Nereis brandti which emerge from the sea mud to spawn during the last quarter of the lunar cycle, to fluctuating ocean bodies, life-bearing bodies, shapeshifting beings like the Selchidh, and the material and ritual practices that arise at spaces of encounter, each contains a kind of transition. The foreshore as location or place of departure becomes an orientation around which processes unfold – bodies collide, dry up, change form; materials fix or alter state; cycles end and begin again – encompassing a realm that is both spatial and temporal, known and unknown.\

— Xan Shian (MFA, UBC 2021) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work considers how the folklores she grew up with attend to the in-between spaces of personal, cultural and material encounter by seeking what is absent or unaccounted for. She has shown works at spaces including Gallery 44 (Toronto), the Polygon Gallery (Vancouver), Projet Pangée (Montreal) and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver).