This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium explores the renowned poet’s deep connection to the natural world. A collaboration between artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, this work examines pure color found in plants and the symbolism of flowers in art and literature.
In a gesture honoring her nearly 200-year-old effort, the photographers grew 66 plants in their gardens to recreate the 66-page herbarium with a Victorian photo process. Anthotypes, plant-based photographs, are made by applying a plant or flower’s colorful juices to paper, then exposing the paper (with a photographic negative on top) to the sun. In her lifetime.
Dickinson was not known as a poet but as an accomplished gardener, as well as a student of botany. Her herbarium book is filled with over 400 pressed plants that she collected from her Massachusetts garden and on walks. This book recreates these pages that are tucked away and protected because they are now too fragile to view - reproducing the book in shimmering plant color.
