Artist Interview: Maya El Nahal
What effect has folklore had on the way you see the world?
My family are very into storytelling and mystery. Our yearly family holiday was a little cottage in the Highlands, and as a kid growing up in a city, it felt like stepping into a myth. I’ve been given magic through both my mum and dad’s sides. In the Kerry town my paternal grandmother is from, there are stories and songs about how our family is descended from selkies. My maternal grandmother was a herbalist and foraged under full moons, she was called a witch by local kids, I don’t think her black cats helped. Both these threads carry histories of insult and ostracization, but for me now, they are things I’m proud of, and have really inculcated a sense of respect for the otherworld.
What stories help you understand your surroundings and inform the way you interact with the world?
I’m someone who often looks to nature for guidance and understanding, so the stories that help me often come from the animals or plants who are trying to get my attention, plus Google when I look at their symbolism in Celtic traditions. It’s no animist folkloric tradition for sure but it works for me!
Do you see folklore as resistance, and if so, to what?
Hell yeah, I could talk about this hours. I think folklore is inherently anarchic, it breathes through oral culture so is always shifting and adapting on the tongues of the people who live it, it’s anti-hierarchical in that way too. It is rooted in the land so resists capitalist modes of operation, the ideas of ownership and domination and exploitation, a lot of folklore storie are baldly against that. Also, it often features beings who are nuanced and morally complicated neither good nor bad, so there’s a queerness there for me, folklore is out beyond binaries and stale cishetnorms. It feels very hopeful for how we can live differently.
Do you think of folklore as a thing of fear and warning or of mysticism and magic?
Why can’t it be all of those things? I think folklore stands against things being good or bad, especially in this country, most of Scotland’s mythic creatures will kill you though they might also be a good omen or carry some gift or wisdom too. Folklore is full and messy, one thing in one instance and another in another. I like that.
What are the themes you are exploring?
Queer and crip ecologies, perennial vibe. I’m also into motherhood, resistance/revolution, animism, chimeras, grief, and play.
What aspect of the modern world is your piece commenting/reflecting on?
My work at the moment explores motherhood as a queer and animal experience, one that really reveals the flaws in our fundamental ideology. Motherhood is held as this foundation of gender, and it’s the site of a lot of oppressive control and domination, but it’s reality is very powerfully beyond binary. I’m trying to find an alternative folklore for motherhood I guess, one that works for me.
What folklore traditions do you take inspiration from?
The land I live on, Scotland, and the lands my nearest ancestors come from – Ireland, England, Scotland, and Bamar Myanmar. I cleave very strongly to traditions that I have a firm connection to, for me those are the only ones I can respectfully draw from.
Tell us a bit about yourself as an artist/writer?
My work always starts with an encounter, a meeting, and I try to follow what it’s asking of me sometimes art happens as a result, sometimes not. I have expansive interests and an overactive imagination, but really I’m driven by intuition and feeling like something needs to happen a certain way.
I like to make connections, join dots up into huge webs of unexpected kin networks. Some accessible animal, being, or experience and then a slightly ridiculous trip, whether that’s concrete as a symbol of euro-patriarchy’s mothering, or funeral rites and memorial drawings for roadkilled birds, or researching foetal microchimerism and writing about the placenta as an organ of transecology. All directions all the time.
I’m also a parent to two young kids, so linearity is no longer possible. Time, thinking, my body, it’s all fragmented and spread out and totally erratic. This has been helpful to step into play and imperfection more, I think those two are really key.
If you were a cryptid or folkloric creature, which one would you be and why?
Oh man I don’t know the names of things enough to be allowed here! But some sort of shape-shifting terrifying protector presence? Maybe centred on a particular area of land, I’d like a coastal forest please, sea and trees. I want to live somewhere beautiful outdoors, and be able to swim and fly. Also to look after lost and hurt things, but be scary and powerful enough to get rid of any marauding dickhead who doesn’t deserve to be there.
See Maya's beautiful piece Cormorant Mother in our first issue, now available on our website at www.folkloricmag.com
You cal also follow Maya on Instagram @mclrart
[originally posted to Patreon on 9/9/25]
