This Earthen Door and The Blue of Distance

Lecture and Reception

May 13, 2026, 5:30-6:30 pm (Wilson Hall’s Concert Hall)

About the Exhibition

This exhibition brings collectively This Earthen Door and The Blue of Distance, two our bodies of labor rooted on the intersection of artwork and science. In This Earthen Door, Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey draw from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, a e-book of pressed vegetation she collected from her backyard; the artists grew and made sunprints from Harvard University’s digital archive of Dickinson’s specimens. Using the anthotype course of, the artists reanimated Dickinson’s floral archive and explored its symbolism. Sobsey’s The Blue of Distance facilities on herbaria and pure historical past collections, bridging artwork, science, and the humanities whereas addressing loss, local weather change, and the ecological threats of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to Nineteenth-century botanist and photographer Anna Atkins—the primary girl photographer and the writer of the primary photographic e-book (1843)—Sobsey merges historic printing strategies with digital strategies to attach previous and current.

About the Artists

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey met in graduate college on the San Francisco Art Institute, the place they studied images. Their friendship grew as a result of their mutual pursuits in ecology and experimental images. This Earthen Door was awarded the 2024 Lenscratch Art & Science Award. 

Amanda Marchand is an award-winning Canadian artist and educator residing in New York. Exhibited internationally in solo and group reveals, her work focuses on the pure world utilizing an experimental strategy to images. Marchand has revealed three monographs with Datz Press: This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium (2024), Nothing Will Ever be the Same Again (2019), and Night Garden (2015). She has additionally revealed a number of artist books and the novel Without stop the earth faintly trembles (DC Books, 2001). Her work is in lots of personal and public collections, such because the Getty Research Institute, Stanford University Libraries, the San José Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Glen Hospital Collection. She has participated in over a dozen artist residencies, together with the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Penland School of Craft, and Studios at Mass MoCA. Marchand can be represented by Traywick Contemporary and Rick Wester Fine Art.

View Amanda Marchand’s website.

Leah Sobsey is an award-winning artist and Associate Professor of Photography on the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her multidisciplinary photographic follow reaches into the fields of nature, science, and design whereas experimenting with installations and textiles. Sobsey’s books embody This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium (Datz Press, 2024) and Collections: Birds Bones and Butterflies (Daylight Press, 2016). She has exhibited internationally, and her images and books are held in personal and public collections throughout the United States, such because the Brandywine Museum of Art, the Huntington Library, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Credit Suisse, the Cassilhaus Collection, Duke University Hospital, Fidelity Investments, and the Microsoft Collection. She has participated in quite a few artist residencies, together with with the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, Penland School of Craft, the National Park Service, the Hambidge Center, and HablaMexico. Her work has been revealed in Artnews, New Yorker.com, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com, Hyperallergic.com, The Telegraph, The Marginalian, and Audubon, Lenscratch, Lensculture. Sobsey is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art.

View Leah Sobsey’s website.

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, Herbarium Plate 13- Purple Foxglove from This Earthen Door. Courtesy of Rick Wester Fine Art.

Leah Sobsey, Wavy Leaf Aster from The Blue of Distance. Courtesy of the artist Leah Sobsey.