From strange lumps of life that wash up on the shore to unexplained voices on audio recordings, Nancy Andrews explores our relationship with the peculiar, the other, the unseen. She conducts many of these investigations through Ima Plume, Public Illustrator, the central character in her trilogy of experimental films. Plume tries to make sense of it all as a "chalk-talk” artist in the tradition of Vaudeville performers who made sketches on stage as part of their comedic routines.

"The main theme is mystery,” says Andrews, a filmmaker and performance artist whose work combines live action, hand-drawn animation and puppetry with footage of the natural world. Her newest film, which completes the trilogy, is The Haunted Camera, in which Ima Plume investigates her own death. Like her creator, Plume has a sense of humor. A blogger wrote that Andrews's new film was the only one in the San Francisco International Film Festival's 2006 program of shorts that made the audience laugh. "That gives me a lot of pleasure,” Andrews says. "I think some audiences are afraid to laugh because it's experimental film and they think they should take it very seriously.”

The mysteries of science and natural history run through all of Andrews's films, which have been presented by the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, Jerusalem Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Filmmakers and other venues. Her films are represented in collections at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, which will premiere The Haunted Camera in October.

Andrews often draws on contemporary and historical figures for her film explorations. She invokes Jane Goodall in Monkeys and Lumps, the first film in the trilogy, which examines our "efforts as humans to understand our relationship with the unknowable.” The second film, The Dreamless Sleep, weaves in brief biographies of medieval mystic Christine the Astonishing and Else Bosselman, who drew the sea creatures William Beebe described from his bathysphere in the 1930s. The unsung brilliance of the actress Hedy Lamarr, who is said to have helped lay the scientific groundwork for radio and cell phone communication, inspired the main character in Hedwig Page, Seaside Librarian. Portrayed by a bespectacled puppet and Andrews herself, Hedwig saves a ship from crashing on the rocks on a foggy night by blowing a seashell horn.

To watch films like Hedwig is to be drawn into a captivating world. Like all of Andrews's films, it's shot in 16mm black-and-white and has both an old-fashioned feel and an edgy charm. "Making these films is a very inefficient process,” says Andrews, who received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and wrote her thesis on the places where film and live performance come together. "But the good thing about groping in the dark is that you're always discovering something.”

Andrews emphasizes the process of discovery with her students at COA, where she has taught courses in filmmaking, performance art and film history since 1999. "I try to strike a balance between teaching the basics and encouraging students to be open to exploring the chance things that happen,” she says. "It's not until you engage in the process that you actually get something, and it almost never will be what you expected. Figuring it out from there is where things get really interesting.”

Things also get interesting in courses like Biology Through the Lens, which Andrews co-taught with COA biology professor Steve Ressel, and Soundscape, which she taught with Sean Todd, a marine mammologist who specializes in bioacoustics. 'One of the things I really enjoy about teaching here is developing courses that probably aren't taught anywhere else in the country,” says Andrews, who shares a home on Mount Desert Island with her partner and fellow COA professor Dru Colbert. 'We're constantly looking at subjects as art and as science, and that's a lot of fun.”