NEW YORK, NY.- Art, nature, and the poet Emily Dickinson are intertwined in a new exhibition this spring. Amanda MARCHAND & Leah SOBSEY: Herbarium & Chromotaxia: Selections from This Earthen Door will be on view from April 10 through June 27, 2025, at Rick Wester Fine Art at 526 West 26th Street in Chelsea. The exhibition is an homage to the poet’s botanical devotion, comprised of images made from plant pigments grown in the artists’ own gardens.

Concurrent with the exhibition at the gallery, Rick Wester Fine Art will also present a selection of the work at The Photography Show presented by AIPAD from April 23 through 27, 2025, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Additionally, on May 25, The Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, will present This Earthen Door through September 7, 2025. A recent monograph of the same title was published in 2024 by Datz Press (Seoul, Korea).

Before Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) gained her reputation as a leading American poet of the 19th century, she was known by family and friends for her passion in gardening. Barely published during her lifetime, it was her sister who uncovered her poetry posthumously and proceeded to publish it. Born into a family of gardeners, Dickinson tended to a large garden at her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, sending fresh bouquets to friends and family (often with poems attached, known as “nosegays”), and studied botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke. The title of This Earthen Door is derived from Dickinson’s poem “We can but follow to the Sun” (We go no further with the Dust; Than to the Earthen Door—) More than a third of her poems and letters reference flowers and plants.

For This Earthen Door Marchand and Sobsey developed a project rooted in Emily Dickinson’s botanical studies. Using anthotype, a plant-and light-based photographic process invented during Dickinson’s era, the exhibition presents a highly pigmented monochromatic re-imagining of the 66 pages of Dickinson’s herbarium, which contains over 400 different species. Housed in the Houghton Library’s Emily Dickinson Collection at Harvard University, they used photographs of the pages as a basis for their work. Complementing the anthotypes, is a series of chromotaxys, or color classifications, composed of grids of pigment from the juices of 66 flowers, symbolizing their shared properties and poetic associations. These works form the artists’ own 21st century herbarium.




Herbariums–flower scrapbooks made by pressing dried plants into the pages of a book–were a popular pastime in Dickinson’s era. She began hers at 14, representing the extraordinary number of plants she collected from her garden and on walks. In a letter to a friend at the time, Dickinson wrote, “I am going to send you a little geranium leaf in this letter, which you must press for me. Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you; most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here.”

In a gesture honoring Dickinson’s effort made more than 180 years ago, and galvanized by the fact that her herbarium is now too delicate for public or private viewing, the artists grew and harvested plants and flowers from their own gardens to remake her sampler. Working in different planting zones in Quebec and North Carolina, the artists were able to bring to life nearly all of Dickinson’s plants in Massachusetts including poppy, daylily, snapdragon, tulip, honeysuckle, dandelion and others.

This Earthen Door encompasses more than three years of work from 2020 - 2023, beginning during the pandemic, when Marchand and Sobsey were sequestered as was Dickinson at her writing desk. As Marchand writes, “Like the time machine that is any herbarium, with its pressed specimens offering a slice of the past, This Earthen Door gives a glimpse into the nature-inspired world of the enigmatic, beloved poet nearly two centuries later – and asks, with today’s “plant invisibility” and climate chaos, where she may point us?”

Amanda Marchand is a Canadian, New York-based photographer and educator. She uses an experimental approach to photography to investigate the natural world and our changing climate. Marchand’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows. Her work has been collected by The Getty Research Institute, San Jose Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, Stanford University Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Glen Hospital MUHC Collection, the Bolinas Art Museum, and the New York Public Library. She holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her recent awards include: The 2024 Lenscratch Art & Science Awards - 1st Place Winner; LensCulture Art Awards 2024 - Winner (3rd place Series); The London Photography Awards 2024; the 21st Julia Margaret Cameron Photography Awards 2023; The 2022 Silver List (Silver Eye Center for Photography and Carnegie Mellon); Medium Photo’s Second Sight Award 2021; Photo Lucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, 2021; the 2019 International LensCulture Art Awards, Winner (2nd Place Series); “Curator's Choice - 2nd Place Winner,” CENTER’s Choice Awards 2015. She is a MacDowell Colony, Hermitage Artist Retreat, and Headlands Center for the Arts Fellow. Marchand’s monographs published by Datz Press include Nothing Will Ever be the Same Again (2019) and Night Garden (2015). Her artist books include The World is Astonishing with You in it: A 21st Century Field Guide to the Birds, Ferns and Wildflowers (2022), The Book of Hours (2018), and Because the Sky (2017). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Leah Sobsey is an image maker, Associate Professor of Photography, curator and director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.  Sobsey’s multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into science, design, installation, and textile. Her photo-based work explores the natural world through archives and taxonomies with an experimental and materials-based approach to photography. Sobsey’s recent collaborative exhibition, In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers, at The Harvard Museum of Natural History, documents species loss through Henry David Thoreau’s herbarium. Her work on plant loss is included in a forthcoming show at the Huntington Museum in California, Fall 2024. Her books include Collections: Birds Bones and Butterflies (2016) and Bull City Summer (2013). Sobsey has exhibited internationally, and her work is held in private and public collections across the US, including North Carolina Museum of Art, Credit Suisse, Cassilhaus Collection, Duke University Hospital, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft Collection, and Grand Canyon National Park. She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Virginia Center for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, Penland, The National Park system, Hambidge, Habla Mexico. She lives and works in Chapel Hill, NC.

RWFA Rick Wester Fine Art is a contemporary art gallery featuring the work of emerging and midcareer artists working in a variety of mediums including photography, painting, sculpture, video and works on paper.

In the field of photographic art sales and promotion for over 40 years, Rick Wester founded Rick Wester Fine Art, Inc. in 2004 specializing in artist representation, consulting to private collectors and corporations, secondary market sales, and appraisals.

RWFA has developed an exciting exhibitions program promoting the work of its artists and other contemporary photographers as well as secondary sales from private collections and estates. RWFA is constantly adding to its secondary market inventory of classic vintage photographs from early modernism through the post-war era, and important contemporary works. RWFA is located at 526 West 26th Street in the heart of New York City's Chelsea art district.