Welcome to our ongoing feature Behind the Slides, where we meet up with an artist who recently presented at a local PechaKucha night and find out the deeper story beneath the images he or she chose to portray.

Emily Candler Davis was one of the presenters at PechaKucha Night, held at the Camden Opera House on November 8. Emily Candler Davis is a photographer, potter, bodyworker, and poet, who lives on Mount Desert Island. She is a graduate of Goddard College and has had her latest project, The Nature and Psyche Project, displayed in Vermont, at the Maine Farmland Trust in Maine, among others. She loves short film forms and being involved in the inherent rights of Nature movement. Being the granddaughter of George Washington Davis, former Maine minister, and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she feels the new civil rights movement is coming forward and the time to act for the benefit of every person and for the Earth is now.

The actual slide notes are in italics. Beneath the slide notes will be the deeper story.

#Journalism is not a crime

“Enchantment is the oldest form of Medicine.”— C.G.Jung

The Nature and Psyche Project is a photographic documentary of current events and is based on the on going dialogue humans have with Nature. The art form happens when we come through our own process into that magical moment, of “Ah-ha,” and into a gracious whole moment. The presence and healing of the moment, where we are open to and engaged with Nature, as with Thich Nhat Hahn’s, “I am in Love with Mother Earth,” and our inter-relation to her, is the heart and soul of the Nature and Psyche Project.

# Journalism is not a crime. This image arose from the cliff sides of Acadia National Park. Distressed by the world’s imprisonment of journalists and artists, imprisonment of the truth, of gnosis, and of our courageous artists in the fields of the world’s struggle toward a green and socially just world, the Earth seemed to shift: “Explain it to me?”and I replied, “I can’t. I can’t explain detention, exploitation, or torture. This hashtag reminds us all to hold true to our idealistic dreaming, our world work and voice, and our constitutions!

Lioness Eye

Taken on a nine-degree day, where the river meets the ocean in a luminous, albeit icy embrace. Dreaming of warmer climates, planting seeds, and thinking deeply on reversing deforestation, “Lioness Eye” emerged from sunlight, water, and stone. A mixture of elements, we greet the image as her own.

“More than 20 percent of the world oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest. More than half of the world’s estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live in the tropical rainforests. One hectare (2.47 acres) may contain more than 750 types of trees and 1,500 species of higher plants. The U.S. National Cancer Institute has identified 3,000 plants that are active against cancer cells. Seventy percent of these plants are found in the rainforest. Twenty-five percent of the active ingredients in today’s cancer-fighting drugs come from organisms found only in the rainforest.” Savetheamazon.org

Mysteries

Pure organic water.

The grandmothers sing chants of praise and thanksgiving to the water for giving us life—under current Pachamama law adopted by India, Bolivia, Ecuador, Columbia, and Parts of the United States (OH, MN, PA, CA, CO).

This photograph holds the deep sadness and struggles of the tribal nations of the world, the recent murder of rainforest activists, the political struggles against dictators, and the deep topic of instilling the inherent rights of things (tribes, people, animals, lands, mountains, rivers) to their personhood and protected under the law.

“Matadorian Lucifer”

I feel the greatest personal impact for me as an artist, and as a person, is the great love I have for Mother Earth. This projct has become a newspaper of current events as seen through my lens and the Earth’s imagination.

"Matadorian Lucifer’s story is the sadness of the concentration camps at the borders in America. How did we as a nation go from "Never Again" and fighting the good fight of World War II, to holding the shadow? The sweetness of his mouth, and the bullet wound, just like the recent transgender woman who was shot point-blank at the border.

Drungpa

So much of the project has come to me from a long line of ancestors my grandfather, a liberation theologian, his great good work with Dr, Martin Luther King in Seminary School At Crozier, Dr. King's great work with Thich Nhat Hahn, and Thich Naht Hahn's great work with Mindfulness, Buddhism, and my own bodywork practice.

“Drungpa” peers out from the branches and flowers; his is a presence of limerence and a deep Bon Buddhist Mandala. He gazes deep: “ How could the UN state to the Rohingya that the genocide continues without any other thought?

To learn more about Emily Davis’s work visit her portfolio of: The Nature and Psyche Project