Excerpt:
Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand have created an exquisite book, This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, published by Datz Press. This Earthen Door is a cross-disciplinary inquiry exploring renowned poet Emily Dickinson’s deep connection to the natural world. In brilliant, non-synthetic plant color, this book follows the chronology of Emily Dickinson’s original 66-page herbarium—a book of pressed plants made as a teenager. A collaboration between artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, the photographs are each made from the pigments of plants the artists grew in their gardens, re-imaging the poet’s herbarium in the language of our time. An inner booklet includes a piece of handmade, wildflower-seed paper as a plantable Dickinson poem.
A statement by the artists on THIS EARTHEN DOOR:
Since 2020, Leah Sobsey and I, Amanda Marchand, have been collaborating on the making of “This Earthen Door,” a work documenting our encounter with poet Emily Dickinson’s herbarium. Published, largely, only after her death, the iconic 19th-century poet was better known as a gardener during her lifetime. Over one-third of her poems and half her letters reference flowers and plants, illuminating her deep connection to the natural world.
In a gesture honoring her nearly 200-year-old effort, we grew and harvested plants to remake her flower-sampler with an alternative photo process known as anthotype. “Antho” means flower in Greek. Anthotypes are plant-based photographs, an innovation dating back to when Dickinson was at work on her herbarium. This eco-feminist collaboration provides a portal through which we examine our changing environment today.
We partnered with two scientists: Dr. Kyra Krakos, a professor of biology; and Peter Grima, botanist and Dickinson herbarium scholar. “This Earthen Door” is a two-part work: in conversation with scientists and Dickinson scholars, it is forging a necessary conversation between art and ecology. Part I, HERBARIUM, reanimates Emily Dickinson’s original herbarium in shimmering plant hues. Part II, CHROMOTAXIA, is our “research project,” including 33 science-based data-drawings that address climate, botany, and ecologically focused stories about the gardener-poet.
What valuable information can be excavated from this 200-year-old nearly forgotten archive? This Earthen Door gives a glimpse into the nature-inspired world of the enigmatic poet and asks where she might point us in this moment of “plant invisibility” and climate chaos.