Written by the artists: Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey
“THIS EARTHEN DOOR” is an exhibition on display at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum that highlights iconic poet Emily Dickinson’s love for botany through contemporary art.
The exhibition will be on display through March 31, 2024. The Sachs Museum is open for visitors daily between 11:30am–4:30pm.
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Inspiration for “tHIS EARTHEN DOOR”
Did you know that the famous American poet and writer Emily Dickinson was trained as a botanist and had an extensive garden at the Dickinson homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts?
In fact, she was better known as a gardener than a poet during her lifetime; over one-third of her poems and half her letters reference flowers and plants, with intimate and idiosyncratic symbolism, illuminating her deep connection to the natural world.
She was known around town for gifting nosegays (small flower bouquets) with a poem or words tucked inside.
The artwork series we collaborated on, “THIS EARTHEN DOOR”, recreates all 66 pages of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium in photographs that are made with juices from 66 plants the nineteenth-century poet grew in her garden or collected on walks.
Floriography, the popular “Victorian language of flowers,” was at its height in the nineteenth-century, with flower dictionaries an absolute must in any library. For the Victorians, flowers were emblems – moral, aspirational, personal, a subtle language of giving and receiving or marking occasions.
Dickinson’s poetry reveals a studied intimacy with flowers that supersedes mere floriography.
The career of flowers differ from ours only in audibleness. I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense of transport may surpass our own.
Excerpt from letter written to Louise Norcross from Emily Dickinson (1873)
Our collaborative project is a photographic re-working of Dickinson’s herbarium, a forgotten book of pressed plants that lives at the intersection of science, art, and poetry. It provides a portal through which we examine plant stories, our changing environment, eco-feminism, as well as renewable, non-toxic darkroom practices with a long-range view of eco-social engagement and environmental issues.
We met during graduate studies in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, and our friendship grew with mutual interests in ecology, experimental photography, archives and bookmaking. We also a shared a love for the poet and her incredibly beautiful botanical sampler, made when Emily was a teenager around the age of 14.
How “THIS EARTHEN DOOR” was created
Photo 2:Herbarium Plate 12, Salvia – Anthotype. Photo by Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey]
“THIS EARTHEN DOOR” re-makes Dickinson’s herbarium with an early-photographic plant-based process, known as an Anthotype. Antho comes from the Greek, meaning flower.
1. Growing Dickinson’s Garden
We began our project towards the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. While sheltering at home, we selected different species of plants from the 424 species in Dickinson’s herbarium, growing them in our own gardens in Canada and North Carolina. We used their petals, leaves, or fruits for our colorful anthotype emulsions, bringing to life the radiant, non-synthetic colors of plant pigments.
2. Printing with plants
Anthotypes require time and patience, and a pinch of luck.
To make each print, we used a mortar and pestle, creating a flower/plant emulsion, coating it on paper through a wet “wash” tincture or dry “rubbing.” This alternate rubbing preparation gave us, ultimately, two different colors per plant.
We then exposed the coated papers to UV sunlight with a digital negative of Dickinson’s herbarium on top. Anthotypes are slow, taking days to expose, though more often, weeks to months for the required photographic density.
This slowed-down rhythm of working reflected pandemic time as we worked from home.
3. Creating an Herbarium
While our images may look like we picked and laid actual living flowers down on the paper, we in fact used a digital photograph of Dickinson’s herbarium for each exposure.
The original herbarium is tucked away at Harvard University in their rare book collection, too fragile now to access, but digital copies can be viewed online. The digital photographs we used to make our anthotypes are borrowed with permission from Harvard’s Houghton Library’s digital archive.
From the digitized color pages, we made black & white photographic negatives. Our process is a mix of old and new, combining early, exploratory, photographic alchemy with new digital technologies.
Gradually, as we worked coating papers and exposing them to the sun over that first summer and fall—then winter, THIS EARTHEN DOOR evolved into a two-part, mirrored project.
The first half, “Herbarium”, is a recreation of Dickinson’s herbarium in pure plant color. We made it in alignment with our garden clocks, the changing seasons, the strength of the sun at different latitudes, and with much experimentation.
4. Exploring color in Nature
The second half of the project, “Chromotaxy”, grew out of our many discussions on Dickinson as an “eco-reporter,” a friend to flowers, a budding and astute botanist, and accomplished gardener.
These facts were buttressed by a desire to deepen and foster our understanding of nature, while recognizing its fragility and our need to protect it. We began reaching out to scientists and scholars with questions about the plant world andDickinson.
As we gleaned more information about the vast and connected life of plants in relation to the poet, we became curious. What would a 21st-Century herbarium look like? Could we create something that might address all we had learned through our readings and conversations with scientists?
In “Part II: Chromotaxy”, we elaborate on the many insights and discoveries about plants with a set of contemporary color schemas.
Chromotaxy: color + taxonomy
We borrowed the name from Italian, nineteenth-century botanist and mushroom hunter, Pier Andrea Saccardo, author of a classification system of 50 colors he called “Chromotaxia.”
Our Chromotaxys are made with the painterly washes and rubbings we prepared. The colors are, essentially, our scanned photo papers, before we made them into anthotypes.
These contemporary “data drawings” show an arrangement of the plant pigments thematically, in different combinations, reworked digitally on the computer.
Each is titled after a line of verse from Emily Dickinson. Our compositions share color stories that range from Victorian flower symbolism, Pantone colors, pollinators, plants native or endangered to Amherst, to the global pandemic phenomenon of gardening, all through the mysterious poet’s lens.
“THIS EARTHEN DOOR” at the Garden
“THIS EARTHEN DOOR” arrived at the Sachs Museum in November of 2023 and was on display throughout the winter and spring season at the Missouri Botanical Garden. A virtual tour of the show is available online.
Along with the artwork, a special program interpreting Emily Dickinson’s poetry took place at the Sachs Museum on December 10 in honor of the poet’s birthday.
Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey | Creators of “THIS EARTHEN DOOR”
All artwork: copyright Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand.
This project would not be what it is without a great amount of seeding and harvesting from others. Artist and educator, Anne Eder, first got us started on the anthotype path in a class at Harvard University. On the scientific front, Dr. Kyra Krakos and Peter Grima have been a vital presence throughout, sharing their research and expertise, and participating as collaborators.
Marta MacDowell, whose book “Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life,”helped us shape our project early on. Marta Werner, author with Jen Bervin of “The Gorgeous Nothings,” is another light, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for her support.
This project launched at the inaugural, contemporary art fair, PhotoFairs in NYC with Rick Wester Fine Art – we are grateful to both.
We would like to thank Nezka Pfeifer of the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum for exhibiting the work in what couldn’t be a more appropriate setting – the Missouri Botanical Garden!
Jessika Eidson | Public Information Officer
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