This Earthen Door | May 2 - June 27, 2026

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey’s This Earthen Door is an ongoing collaborative project that reimagines Emily Dickinson’s 19th-century herbarium through photography, botany, archival research, and plant-based processes. Developed over more than five years, the work takes Dickinson’s book of pressed plants, now housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library and too fragile to be handled, as its point of departure. Created as a teenager and eventually comprising more than 400 specimens, Dickinson’s herbarium remains one of the most complete records of her sustained engagement with the natural world.

Working from Dickinson’s original plant lists, Marchand and Sobsey grew selected species in their own gardens in Quebec and North Carolina before using those plants to remake pages from the herbarium through anthotype, an early camera-less photographic process dating to the 1840s. Anthotypes are created using pigments extracted directly from plants and exposed to sunlight over extended periods ranging from days to months. The resulting works are both materially and conceptually rooted in the living systems from which they emerge, carrying within them the effects of light, duration, seasonality, and organic change.

Marchand and Sobsey, both graduates of the San Francisco Art Institute, move fluidly between historical research and experimental image-making, bringing Dickinson’s project into dialogue with contemporary questions surrounding ecology, species loss, environmental stewardship, and the long-standing contributions of women working across art and science. Throughout the series, the artists position the herbarium not only as a botanical archive, but also as a record of attention, care, and observation.

As This Earthen Door has traveled and expanded, it has developed into what the artists describe as a broader “21st-century herbarium,” shaped through engagement with local plants, researchers, scientists, and communities at each exhibition site. The presentation at Traywick Contemporary includes a commissioned collaboration with the Point Reyes National Seashore Association (PRNSA), developed in connection with the organization’s ongoing coastal conservation and fundraising efforts. Using both native and invasive California plant species, the new work extends the project’s environmental focus to Northern California landscapes while drawing attention to ecological restoration efforts within the Point Reyes National Seashore.

The exhibition presents a focused selection from a larger body of more than fifty works, ranging from intimate botanical impressions to expansive chromotaxies composed from plant-derived pigments. Together, the works form a meditation on material transformation, environmental change, historical memory, and the enduring resonance of Dickinson’s study of plants nearly two centuries later.

Images:

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey: Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey  Blue Delphinium - Plate 35, 2023. Archival pigment print from anthotype; 40 x 31.5", edition of 6

Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey  This was in the White of the Year, 2023. Archival pigment print from anthotype; 50 x 39", edition of 5

Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey  Wild nights - Wild nights!, 2023 Archival pigment print from anthotype; 40 x 31.5" (edition of 6)