Welcome to our new feature Behind The Slides, where we meet up with an artist who just presented in Pecha Kucha and find out the deeper story beneath the images they chose to portray.

Elisa Wike Hurley, from Mt. Desert Island, was the last of eight artists to speak at the Sept. 13 Pecha Kucha event held at Bay View Street Cinema in Camden. Like the others, she took the audience through her creative process in a visual storytelling format with a 20-second-per-image, 20-image slideshow. Unlike most artists who have a very specific process to their design, Hurley, instead told a story of the personal journey she’s been on for four years since a painful separation leading to divorce in which she found herself inexplicably alone and lost.

“I have different photos of wandering in and through the woods, where I found comfort,” she said. “Others in this Pecha Kucha series include photos of a 95-year-old artist named Ruth in a nursing home, whom I found on one of these wanderings,” she said.

Rather than over-explain it, we will provide a sample of Hurley’s photos in the right column and match them with the actual slide notes (in italics). Beneath the slide notes will be the deeper story.

The cave

The quiet darkness of a cave is not where I expected to find myself in the middle of winter on Mount Desert Island. But there I was. Sitting. Old Sorrels soaked, camera in my hand.

“I had been married for 25 years and over the course of a year or two, my husband couldn’t figure out if he was still interested in being married or not. I had two teenage children and as difficult as that was, I knew it wasn’t right. Regardless, after he left, there was this inevitable, momentous grief process. We’d been through everything together, so I was in shock. I found myself guided to get out of the house, get out of what was familiar and enter the woods. This is a cave near Echo Lake and it was winter. I just started prowling around and would find myself nestling into things, like going into caves or holes or lying down where deer might have lain down. I think the cave was a little for comfort and a lot about facing your fear like walking into a dark place where you don’t know what’s in there or what you’ll encounter, but you go in anyway. I felt, ‘You’re going to be on your own, so face those fears.’”

Self portrait

Then again, I didn’t expect my 25-year marriage to end the way it did. The kitchen floor, my dearest friend, bits of sticky rice next to my cheekbone. Please help me. No, I didn’t expect that at all.

“One of the things I gave myself permission to do is in my bedroom, now that it wasn’t a shared bedroom, I started writing on the wall with chalk, at first, to be practical. Because if I ever had to move, you could easily get rid of chalk. And then, I’d use anything, marker, crayons. It was very freeing to express myself immediately on something. And in this photo, on this day, it was an agonizing day. I wore this magenta beret a lot. If my eyes were looking up, you’d notice how worn they were.”

The boots

The whisper — get up. The voice — go outside Elisa. Enter the woods. Prowl, climb, crawl, dig. And so I did for almost two years.

“You really can’t see from the shot, but my pants are torn and ripped. In Bar Harbor, there’s a very steep, muddy embankment by the water and I just starting climbing it. I kept tumbling back down. Again, it was about facing my fears to get to the top. I remember the whole time I kept saying ‘you could do this’; the tree roots helped me up. When I finally made it, I just collapsed at the top. For some reason, this is when I decided to pull out my camera and take a shot of my boots.”

Ruth

At the edge of the Atlantic, where river meets source, I met Ruth. Artist. 95. Tucked like a bird in a nest, tucked in a blue gray chair in a nursing home.

“I kept wandering that day and found myself at the edge of the Atlantic in March. On that piece of property is a beautiful mansion that serves as a nursing home and rehabilitation center. I got this intuitive blast that I was going to get myself cleaned up and go back there the next day with flowers, but I didn’t know who I was going to give them to. There is a period in the grief when you have to get out of yourself and maybe it’s time to see that there are other people in the world who are suffering. So I did that. I gave flowers to a woman in the last room on the left and as I was leaving, I had a distinct feeling that there was still someone I was supposed to meet that day. There was a door ajar and I knocked and tucked in this blue gray chair was this woman, Ruth. She said, ‘Hello de-ah.’ We started to talk and I pretty much went back for every day for two years.”

The cattail fluff

I’m not odd. Odd, she told me. I’m awed. I’d like to put some of these milkweed seeds in an envelope and send them to my son. Tell him: this is what I’m working on.

“I’d bring her things I found from outside all the time, rocks, bits of milkweed pods, shells, bones, things she could examine. She’d spend hours looking at the things like an artist. She’d never felt a cattail before and at first, she just touched the velvety outside. After a couple of days, it burst open. It was funny, because she had it all open and laid out on her table. And all of the nurses wanted to clear it out, but she’d barricaded them with stacks of books so they couldn’t get to all this open cattail fluff until she could show it to me.”

To know more about what happened with her journey and with Ruth, Hurley is at work writing a book about these experiences. For more information about Pecha Kucha visit: www.facebook.com/PechaKuchaME

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com