Back to nature

Where does the earth leave off and the body begin?

Artist Faith Fay blurs the distinction, merging the veins of a leaf with the curve of a hip, imposing a cluster of gnarled roots against the soft shadows of a woman’s back.

An exhibit of Fay’s work, “Reconnections,” will be on view through July 13 at Native Arts Gallery on Main Street in Bar Harbor.

Though Fay graduated from Ellsworth High School and attended the University of Maine, she earned her bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Hawaii and now calls Honolulu her home.

“Reconnections” is a series of platinum-palladium photographic prints that charts the transformation Fay felt during a retreat to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. While hiking Kauai’s NaPali Coast, she became reacquainted with nature as well as her Cherokee and Micmac heritage.

To turn that sense of transformation into something tangible, Fay took photographs from that trip and paired them with images of her body. She placed the negatives from each photograph on top of each other and exposed them together, merging them into a photograph. Then, she created another negative from that image, and burned pictures into paper that she had hand-painted with an emulsion of platinum and palladium. It’s a technique similar to black-and-white photo printing, which uses silver as a medium.

At the beginning of the series, the distinction between Fay’s crouching body and the texture of a thorny cactus is clear. As you walk around the room, it’s harder to tell where a hand leaves off and a rock begins. In the last image, she returns to the cactus theme, and the transformation is complete.

“Nature seems to take over and you lose the human figure,” Fay said during a recent interview at the gallery.

The prints are rich and luminous. At first, they look abstract, but as you look closer, you see a cascade of hair woven in with the leaves of a palm, the shadow of a spine behind a cluster of coarse grass. They are at once simple in composition and complex in meaning.

Fay also includes a mural of an American Indian elder woman dancing at a powwow on Oahu. “Ancestors” is a blur of motion – in the background, a triple-exposure gelatin print of the woman is covered in part by a quiltlike pattern of oil paint.

“I’m at a point in my life where I’m trying to connect with that part of my culture and I want to convey that in my artwork,” Fay said. “Paint allows me to express unsaid emotions.”

Native Arts is located at 99 Main St., Bar Harbor. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. For more information, call 288-1091.

Art notes:

. The largest retrospective ever of John McCoy’s paintings recently went up at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland and will remain on view through Oct. 14. McCoy had strong ties to Maine and depicted its rocky coast in oil, tempera and watercolor. The Farnsworth show includes portraits, still lifes and landscapes that speak to those ties. The Farnsworth is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. For information, call 596-6457 or visit www.farnsworthmuseum.org.

. John Edwards Wine Cellar Art Gallery, located in – you guessed it – the wine cellar of John Edwards Market on Main Street in Ellsworth, will feature paintings by Rudolph deHarak and MaJo Keleshian through July 27. Don’t let the crates of wine bottles fool you – this is a real gallery, and owner John Pouwels has a knack for finding strong artists whose work complements each other. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday-Thursday and Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. For information, call 667-9377.

. Feeling charmed? Sam Shaw is. The Northeast Harbor jeweler has assembled a collection of charm bracelets that range from kitschy to classy at his gallery-store, located at 100 Main St. in Northeast Harbor. The bracelets will be on view through July 11, and a show of paintings and pastels by Maine modernists Arthur Thompson and Maurice Freedman will follow from July 12 to 25. For information, call 276-5000 or visit www.shawjewelry.com.