AMANDA MARCHAND

This Earthen Door: 2021 - present

This eco-feminist collaboration with artist Leah Sobsey reanimates Emily Dickinson’s herbarium (botanical sampler) in a work of and for our time. The project employs Anthotypes (from the Greek meaning flower), a plant-based photo process invented during Dickinson’s era just as photography was being born. During her life Dickinson was not famous for her poetry, but for her green thumb - she had an extensive garden and was an avid student of botany. Our project re-makes her 66 herbarium pages with plant pigments from 66 species that we grew and harvested in our own gardens - and that Dickinson grew, among the 400+ herbarium species.

We partnered with scientists/scholars, Dr. Kyra Krakos and Peter Grima, to expand upon Emily’s flower sampler. The color schemas are “data drawings” constructed from research, abstratct color compositions, our own 21st-Century herbarium. Each piece is accompanied by text that explains the arrangement, stories about Dickinson the poet-gardener, about ethnobotany, and the natural world as it is impacted by environmental change. This second half of the project is a sumptuous study of color, telling plant stories through Dickinson’s world of flowers. This Earthen Door considers the current state of climate chaos, investigating our connection to nature - and asks where Emily would point us today.

IMAGES: Image 1-3 & 18: PhotoFairs NYC with RWFA; Image 4: A leaf from Dickinson’s original herbarium and our Herbarium Plate 42 - Pokeweed; Image 5: Herbarium Plate 4 - Marigold; Image 6: Herbarium Plate 8 - Petunia; Image 7: Herbarium Plate 12 - Red Salvia; Image 7: Herbarium Plate 9 - Poppy; Image 10: The earthen door (earth tones); Image 11: Could I - then - shut the Door (Dickinson greenhouse); Image 12: The only ghost I ever saw (Ghost Plant); Image 13: A transport one cannot contain (invasive species); Image 14: Flowers - Well - if anybody (anthotype color wheel); Image 15: This was in the white of the year (Dickinson in white); Images 16 & 17: “This Earthen Door,” Peter and Stephen Sachs Museum, Missouri Botanical Gardens

NEW BOOK: published by Datz Press

Praise for THIS EARTHEN DOOR:

The work launched at PHOTOFAIRS NYC with Rick Wester Fine Art, Sept 2023. PHOTOFAIR founder, Scott Grey, stated in ArtNEWS that it was an “unbelievable beautiful” example of the scope of photography on display at the fair. “It’s absolutely mind blowing,” he said. “When you scratch the surface, and you understand how that was made and how it was produced and the thinking behind it, and the context behind it and the concept, these artists are incredible.” Read the full article HERE.

Read Maria Popova’s article - The Science and Poetry of Anthotypes: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, recreated in Hauntingly Beautiful Flower Pigment Prints via a Victorian Imaging Process: ”Two centuries later, photographers Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey pay an anthotype homage to Dickinson in their lovely collaboration This Earthen Door, titled after a line from her poem “We can but follow to the Sun.” Painstakingly recreating all 66 pages of Dickinson’s herbarium in large-scale anthotypes made with juices from 66 species of plants the poet grew in her garden, they offer something uncommonly lyrical — part color study and part time travel, harmonizing the ephemeral and the eternal, radiating the quiet consolation of the dialogue between nature and human nature.” The Marginalian, Jan 2024.

Upcoming exhibition: The Brandywine Conservancy and Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, Spring/Summer 2025