This Earthen Door is an ongoing collaboration by Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey that reimagines Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, the 19th century book of pressed plants she made as a teen and developed into a record of over 400 specimens. Now housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library and too fragile to be handled, the herbarium survives primarily through digital access, a record of careful study and a reminder of what can be lost over time. Marchand and Sobsey take this important archive as their starting point, engaging it through contemporary photographic, environmental, and cultural inquiry.
The project began over five years ago, when the artists grew selected species from Dickinson’s plant list in their own gardens in Quebec and North Carolina and used those plants to remake pages from the herbarium. The resulting works are created using anthotype, a camera-less photographic process from the 1840s that produces images from plant pigments exposed to sunlight over prolonged periods, from days to months. These images carry the trace of the plants themselves, as well as the time and care required to produce them.
Moving between photography, botany, and archival research, the collaboration is shaped by the artists’ shared history as students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Working from Dickinson’s original project, Marchand and Sobsey bring her practice into the present, placing it in relation to current environmental conditions and to the long-standing contributions of women working across art and science.
As the work has been exhibited across the country, it has expanded into a broader “21st century herbarium,” shaped through engagement with botanists,f plants and communities at various sites. For the exhibition at Traywick Contemporary, a collaboration with the Point Reyes National Seashore Association (PRNSA) extends this work to California, where a new piece is planned using both native and invasive plants to draw attention to their conservation efforts in restoring native ecologies.
The exhibition presents a selection from a larger body of over 50 works, with the complete series available through the accompanying collector’s print box.
Amanda Marchand is a Canadian, New York–based photographer and educator whose work explores the natural world through a materials-based, experimental approach. A fellow of the Hermitage Artist Retreat, MacDowell Colony, and Headlands Center for the Arts, she has received numerous honors, among them the 2024 LensCulture Award and the 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major public and private collections such as the Getty Research Institute, Stanford University Library, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Marchand has published three monographs with Datz Press, among them This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium (2024), along with several artist books. Her work has appeared in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, The Marginalian, and The Washington Post.
Leah Sobsey is a North Carolina–based artist and Associate Professor of Photography at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her multidisciplinary practice spans photography, science, and installation, with a focus on plant-based printing processes and archival inquiry. She has exhibited internationally, with recent presentations at the Brandywine Museum of Art, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Missouri Botanical Garden, Rick Wester Fine Art, and Galerie XII. In 2025, she was named the inaugural artist in residence at North Carolina State University’s Plant Science Initiative, collaborating with researchers on site-specific works. Sobsey is the co-author of This Earthen Door (Datz Press, 2024) and has published additional monographs and artist books. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the North Carolina Museum of Art.
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