CHADDS FORD, PA.- Opening at the Brandywine Museum of Art this month, This Earthen Door: Nature as Muse and Material is a remarkably immersive, cross-disciplinary exhibition focused on nature. The exhibition is the culmination of an almost five-year project of artists Amanda Marchand (b. 1972) and Leah Sobsey (b. 1973). Combining natural materials with historical and contemporary photographic processes and inspired by a book of pressed flowers—known as an herbarium—created by renowned poet Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century, Marchand and Sobsey utilized pure pigments extracted from flowers to make a vibrant series of plant-based artworks. The resulting exhibition is a kaleidoscope of colors comprising over 50 works, including two site-specific commissions.

Though now celebrated as one of the country’s foremost poets, Dickinson in her lifetime was also known as an accomplished gardener and student of botany. As a teenager, she began the creation of an herbarium that would be filled with over 400 pressed plants collected from her Massachusetts garden and on walks near her Amherst home. In a gesture honoring Dickinson’s nearly 200-year-old effort, Marchand and Sobsey set out to grow as many of these plants as possible in their own gardens.

Included in the exhibition is a large series of anthotypes, a plant-based process that is one of the earliest forms of photography, and one not requiring a camera. Marchand and Sobsey coated sheets of paper with a light-sensitive emulsion made from the pure pigments they extracted from flowers. The artists then placed transparencies made from Dickinson’s herbarium on their coated papers and exposed them to the sun for weeks or even months. The sun’s bleaching rays left a shadow imprint of Dickinson’s original arrangements of plants on the paper, creating camera-less sun-prints of her now inaccessible book. Using this process, they recreated the 66 pages from Dickinson’s original herbarium, reanimating her botanical endeavors for the twenty-first century.

The exhibition also features a number of compositions that the artists call The Chromotaxia, which are composed with the colored sheets of pure pigment from the 66 flowers (their “photo papers”). Each chromotaxy composition provides additional insight into Dickinson’s—and the contemporary—botanical world. The title of each chromotaxy is the first line of a Dickinson poem and signals the theme around which the pigments of various flowers are grouped. For example, the 94-panel grid of To make a prairie represents the self-fertilizing plants in Dickinson’s herbarium. These so-called “self-compatible” plants are increasingly necessary in a world where pollinators are threatened. In this way, Marchand and Sobsey emphasize the full meaning—visually and conceptually—that these plants had for Dickinson and still hold today.

“With This Earthen Door, Amanda and Leah have created a lush inquiry into the ephemerality of nature, the range of pure color to be derived by flowering plants, as well as their fascinating symbolism, now largely lost to contemporary audiences. The artists have beautifully highlighted the connections between art, poetry and science” said Thomas Padon, the James H. Duff Director of the Brandywine Museum of Art. “The exhibition brings to light Emily Dickinson’s scientific inquiries and reframes her storied herbarium for contemporary audiences, while also connecting them to new ways of appreciating our natural environment. With the included site-specific pieces created by the artists expressly for the exhibition, a new and final chapter of their multi-year project is brought to life,” he added.

The first site-specific work, Estranged from Beauty – none can be –, is a grouping of 10 anthotypes of invasive species found in the Brandywine Conservancy’s 170-acre Waterloo Mills Preserve, located in Easttown Township, Chester County and Newtown Township, Delaware County. Exploring the duality of these flowering plants, the artists celebrate their beauty while underscoring the danger they pose to the local ecosystem. The second site-specific work, Talk not to me of Summer Trees, is a chromotaxy featuring 56 sheets representing the pure color extracted from 14 tree species from Waterloo Mills Preserve, capturing the pigments of the leaves in both summer and autumn. Speaking of both site-specific works of art, Padon noted they “highlight the Brandywine Conservancy’s environmental stewardship efforts and honor Brandywine’s mission, history and future.”

“Emily Dickinson’s book of flowers was an object that had long inspired us. Her herbarium lives in a temperature-controlled vault at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and crumbles if handled, so it is off-limits to even the most accomplished scientists,” said artist Leah Sobsey. “We wanted to see or hold this special object—a forgotten treasure at the intersection of art and science—and knew we never could,” added artist Amanda Marchand. “As creatives we decided, why not remake it for ourselves—and others?”