For This Earthen Door, Amanda Marchand and I developed a project rooted in 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, we used photographs of the pages as a basis for our 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 our own 21st century herbarium.
This Earthen Door encompasses more than three years of work from 2020 - 2023, beginning during the pandemic, when Amanda and I were sequestered as was Dickinson at her writing desk. Our collaboration research and efforts were assisted with scholarship provided by scientists Dr. Kyra Krakos in Missouri and Peter Grima in Massachusetts. As Amanda 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 may she point us?”