Drew Darling often recites William Shakespeare’s sonnets to himself. He runs the lines in his head to keep them memorized. But he doesn’t often speak them to other people.

“I don’t go around saying, ‘Hey, want to hear a sonnet?’ It’s mostly an interior dialogue,” Darling, 70, of Camden, said. “They live in me. I haven’t had the chance to give them to anyone out loud.”

Until he found The Listening Wall.

In a gallery at Fort Andross in Brunswick, The Listening Wall lent an ear – literally. The wall is a simple piece of plywood painted white. In the middle is a hole, and in the hole is an ear. Darling approached, bent down to the ear and spoke Sonnet 61.

“Is it thy will thy image should keep open / My heavy eyelids to the weary night?” he began.

The ear belongs to Midcoast artist Hannah Elizabeth Bevens, who was seated on the other side of the plywood. The Listening Wall is an art installation and an experiment, an offering and an invitation. It can set up on a sidewalk, in a bar or at a gallery. The project grew from the artist’s own desire to be heard.

“I was thinking about the fact that I had a lot of stuff to say, and I didn’t feel like anybody was listening,” Bevens, 32, said. “I wish somebody was listening.”

BEING HEARD

Bevens created The Listening Wall in 2019 as a master’s student at the Maine College of Art and Design in Portland. But the project wasn’t for class; it was for fun.

“I put it up for First Friday, and I sat for five hours,” they said.

Bevens is an artist and a writer. Their work has spanned theater and multimedia art and large-scale installations. Lately, their primary focus has been painting. Their art has often explored trauma and grief, but more recently, Bevens has been thinking about forgiveness.

“That piece of forgiveness for my own personal life transformed my work from being more about trauma and abuse and protest, and turned it more into this realization that forgiveness is really for yourself,” Bevens said. “It’s a big component in being able to grieve a lot of the abstract losses that happen in our life and traumatic events, and being able to let go of those.”

Those same themes apply to The Listening Wall.

“I’m accessing other people’s desire to get something out, to prompt that process for them,” Bevens said. “I don’t really do anything with what people tell me. I’ve jotted down a few things. But really I think there’s this connection between our ability to forgive and our really deep desire to be heard, and something about just saying something out loud gets that process started.”

The wall is exactly what it sounds like. The plywood, roughly 4.5-feet tall and 2-feet wide, is painted white to emulate a stark gallery wall. The effect makes the ear look a little bit like a mounted piece of artwork. That visual impact alone was interesting to Bevens.

“Ears have this strange but gentle kind of form to them,” Bevens said. “Ears are weird. They look like shells, or unfurling flowers.”

CREATING TRUST

Underneath the hole, Bevens tapes a small piece of paper that begins: “Welcome to The Listening Wall.”

“This wall does not keep things out or in,” it reads. “This wall lets things through. This wall is a place for freedom. Behind this wall sits The Listener. Their only role and objective is to listen to you, the Speaker.”

Behind the wall is a stool, where Bevens sits and presses their ear up to the hole. The paper also includes three considerations for The Speaker, their only parameters.

1. Speak freely and without concern.
2. The Listener does not offer The Speaker any verbal response.
3. The Listener is a real person, actively listening with trained sensitivity. Please maintain a clear, respectful volume, and do not share information that may make The Listener mutually responsible in any of your truths.

Basically: Don’t yell, and don’t confess crimes.

“There’s really no instructions on what to do,” Bevens said with a laugh. “One time, someone sat down and listened to me listening, and they thought that’s what The Listening Wall was. And that was sort of funny, and I haven’t changed it. Because I think that’s funny that that can happen.”

Bevens doesn’t do anything special to prepare for a session as The Listener (other than make sure their ears are clean). They don’t see the time spent on the other side of the wall as a physical or emotional burden. They are comfortable sitting in position for hours at a time, perhaps because of their job as a lifeguard.

“I have always been an observer and a quiet listener,” they said. “I’m pretty good at sitting really still for a long time.”

They generally do not hold onto the things they hear through The Listening Wall.

“I’ve learned now after doing it for a handful of years that we are all a lot more similar, or at least we’re all dealing with a lot more similar things than we might realize,” Bevens said. “So the ubiquity of what people tell me sometimes allows me to just let it pass through me.”

The whole thing reminds Bevens of an exercise from therapy. If Bevens had something to tell a person who was not there, the therapist would suggest that they could say the words to an empty chair.

“My therapist would be sitting there next to the empty chair, and I’m like, ‘I don’t want to. You’re right there,’ ” Bevens said. “It’s this funny balance between the stakes being raised enough that there’s someone behind the wall, and they could potentially judge you, or they could potentially respond to you, but they trust that I’m not going to. And that’s something that keeps me interested in it. There’s something more than this deep need to be heard.

“I think we all really want to be heard, but I think more than that, we all really want to feel trust. And that’s really hard to come by, a very intimate trust.”

VARIED RESPONSES

The response to the Listening Wall varies widely.

Some people are nervous. They speak quickly and then walk away. Others will spend a long time at the wall or even find something to sit on during their visit so they can talk for a longer period of time. They’ll settle in and tell a story.

“I often get a person who will come up and be like, “OK, what do I want to say to you? I guess I could tell you about my day. I guess I could tell you what I ate for dinner last night. And then after talking for a little while, it’s like the warmup of every therapy session. Where you’re like, here’s how this went before we get into the deep stuff. And then finally, they’ll come out with something.”

Women often thank The Listener. People sometimes confess infidelity or talk about their relationships. Others recite poems. Some people peek at The Listener. Bevens once brought the wall to Harvard Square and found the students there were less inclined to speak to the ear and more likely to poke their heads around to question the artist.

It can be hard sometimes to stay silent.

“Somebody told me that they had their first queer experience,” Bevens said. “They told me in really romantic, sweet detail, and I just wanted to reach around the wall and hold their hand. And I didn’t. But it was like one of those moments where you’re just like, you need a hug too. And I do have to restrain myself.”

And Bevens does sometimes want to keep the words spoken through the hole in the wall. Recently, they jotted down one speaker’s message.

“This wall, it so embodies a wall,” the person said. “And I just want to tell it everything but it already knows, like the wall I talked to in my room, and in this closed cafe, and every wall – you’re just such a wall! And I want to tell you everything but the wall already knows, so – just so much gratitude for the walls.”

The venue can impact the experience. In a city such as Portland, where people often interact with strangers, anonymity seems to be freeing for some speakers. For several months in a row this winter, Bevens brought The Listening Wall to the Waldoboro Inn. In a small community, where many people knew the artist or each other, trust is sometimes harder earned. Bevens wants to continue that recurring series to see how the relationship develops.

Bevens would like to tour The Listening Wall in and beyond Maine.

“I’d like to experiment with it not just in different demographics of class and race and gender and all those things, but also like different family dynamics and subtle differences where communication can change drastically,” Bevens said. “It would be really interesting if the wall was for hire, and you could put it in your dining room at a holiday, and your family talks to it, you know. That would be so strange.”

They also hope to take more notes and do more writing about the experience. Perhaps Bevens will create a book or a workshop in the future about different types of listening.

“There’s ways to share being The Listener,” Bevens said. “Because I don’t think I’m the only one who gets to be that.”

BACK AT THE FORT

In February, Bevens brought The Listening Wall to Fort Andross, where Lights Out Gallery was hosting a closing party for a pop-up exhibition. Dressed all in black, they quietly took their seat behind the wall and rested their ear in place. For a while, guests did not seem to know what to do, eyeing Bevens from afar. Slowly, they began to approach.

Darling was one of the first. He is a regular swimmer at the pool where Bevens is a lifeguard, so he knew about the project. It reminds him of Samuel Beckett’s “one-mouth” play called “Not I,” a short dramatic monologue that is staged in pitch black with a narrow spotlight on the actor’s mouth. But he did not prepare anything for The Listening Wall and chose the sonnets on a whim mostly because he thought Bevens would like them.

“I wanted to give them to diversify the experience of the artist,” he said.

Neil Crane, of Thomaston, joined his friend. The Listening Wall reminded him of going to confession as a child, a comparison Bevens hears often.

“I didn’t have much to say to The Listening Wall,” Crane, 71, said. “I’m an introvert.”

They both said they felt more pressure to choose their words carefully because they knew someone was actually paying attention.

“You can tell someone your whole life story without them really listening,” Darling said.

And perhaps some people did. One woman, when asked if she would share what she told the wall, said no. But Cindy Thompson and Matt Rawdon, of Cumberland, beamed as they talked about their own experience. They compared the ear to a work of art, just like the paintings on the surrounding walls.

“We spoke to the wall that their ear was beautiful,” Thompson said.

Still, Thompson said she couldn’t help from peeking around the wall to see the rest of Bevens.

“I gave it a chance by itself, and then I probed,” she said with a laugh. “I find it very wonderful and exquisite.”

Kyle Downs, of Bowdoinham, confessed his own nerves to the wall. The setup negates cues, such as body language, that a speaker might normally use to choose their next words in a social situation. But he talked through the discomfort and settled into, not a conversation, but a rhythm.

“I told them all my best ideas,” Downs, 40, said.

“To be very intimate, it takes a minute,” he added. “That’s what I told the wall, that I was glad that I came and maybe I would like to have one installed at my house.”

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