Littoral Space(s): Liquid Edges of Poetic Possibility

Islands have inspired a history of folklore, literary genres and artistic visual work, continually captivating human creativity and imagination. This multi‐media article presents work that moves beyond traditional boundaries of the educational field to link nationally with the Institute of Island Studies, located at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and internationally with the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative, hosted by the Island Cultures Centre at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Through the vehicle of video, interweaving imagery and improvisational music, the artist‐researcher examines island as a distinctive geographical site and the spatial dimensions of island locality. The author applies methods of visual poetic inquiry while integrating perspectives of image‐based arts with disciplines of island studies, philosophy, and human/cultural geography. The intentionality of the work is to stimulate a multi‐layered "trans‐disciplinary" approach (Baldacchino, 2006) to island studies and qualitative research and to represent the emergent process of developing an island aesthetic methodology. The aim of the article is to expand island studies as an artistic inter‐discipline and to contribute to the growing theory of islandness or "nissology" (McCall, 1996).