News
PRAISE FOR THIS EARTHEN DOOR
New Jersey Lifestyle Magazine, Spring 2025: “Lifestyle Art: POETRY IN BLOOM”
February 18, 2025
“What better way to celebrate spring than to visit the Brandywine Museum of Art’s new exhibition, This Earthen Door, on view from May 25, 2025 to September 08, 2025. Curated as an interdisciplinary exhibition, This Earthen Door celebrates the poetic beauty of Emily Dickinson’s profound affinity with nature. Through a collection of photographs, Brooklyn artist Amanda Marchand and Chapel Hill artist Leah Sobsey illuminate the vibrant hues of plants and delve into the symbolic significance of flowers in both artistic expression and literature. This ongoing project celebrates the lyrical essence of Dickinson’s natural world collection.”
— Michael Cagno
The Eye of Photography: “Rick Wester Fine Art : Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey : Herbarium & Chromotaxia : Selections from This Earthen Door”
“Art, nature, and the poet Emily Dickinson are intertwined in a new exhibition this spring. Herbarium & Chromotaxia : Selections from This Earthen Door by Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey is on view at Rick Wester Fine Art 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.”
— The Eye of Photography
The Marginalian: The Science and Poetry of Anthotypes: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium by Maria Popova
January 9, 2024
Left: page from Dickinson’s herbarium. Right: anthotype from This Earthen Door.
“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.”
— Maria Popova
LensCulture: Book Review, “This Earthen Door — Sublime Anthotypes, Preserved Plants & Poetry,” by Janelle Lynch
Herbarium Plate 64 – Christmas Cactus (left) Herbarium Plate 65 – Orange Jewelweed on right © Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey
“The book is not only a visual delight, but a tactile one as well. It begins and ends with seven distinctly textured endpapers, each the color of a coated anthotype, a pleasing contrast from the heavy smooth paper used throughout the book. Following the title page is Between My Country — and the Others, a poem from 1862, which reflects Dickinson’s characteristic exploration of the boundaries between the self and the external world, suggesting the delicate balance between isolation and connection. Timely and timeless notions.”
— Janelle Lynch
ART FAIR THE ARMORY SHOW: This is how history is continued in New York, Frankfurter Allgemeine Newspaper
ArtDaily: “Amanda MARCHAND & Leah SOBSEY: Herbarium & Chromotaxia: Selections from This Earthen Door opens at Rick Wester Fine Art”
April 19, 2025
Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, Wild nights – Wild nights!, 2023. Chromotaxy, Edition 5 of 5 + 2 APs. Archival pigment print, 50 x 39 inches (127 x 99.1 cm) Sheet © Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey, courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art.
“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.”
— ArtDaily
F-Stop Magazine: “Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey @ Rick Wester Fine Art”
March 4, 2025
“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 reference flowers and plants.”
— Rick Wester Fine Art
photo-eye: “This Earthen Door: Reviewed,” by Cheryl Van Hooven
October 28, 2024
“Considering This Earthen Door through the lens of ecofeminism (“a view of the world that respects organic processes, holistic connections and the merits of intuition and collaboration”*), one sees the deep connections between Amanda Marchand’s and Leah Sobsey’s three year immersion into the world of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium with the alchemy of plant emulsions, collaborative research and practice.”
— Cheryl Van Hooven
White Hot Magazine: “The Best Art in the World,” Photofairs 2023 Triumphantly Debuts in New York by J. Scott Orr
September 9, 2024
Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey from This Earthen Door. Photo by Jamie Lubekin
“This Earthen Door is a unique presentation from artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey that honors the green thumb of American poetry doyenne Emily Dickinson. While her poetry was little known during her lifetime, Dickinson’s facility with plants was hardly a secret.”
— J. Scott Orr
What Will You Remember: “A New York Minute: What Makes It Great?”
June 11, 2025
“Herbarium Plate 35 – Delphinium, 2023” by Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, courtesy of the artists and Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC.
“If you love gardens and Emily Dickinson, Rick Wester Fine Art is exhibiting a selection of the colorful collaboration between Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, This Earthen Door…If all this seems academic, it doesn’t feel that way. Marchand and Sobsey have created gorgeous, ethereal anthotypes whose joyful installation is the very definition of sublime.”
— Elin Spring
Fine Books & Collections: “Photo-Based Work Inspired by Emily Dickinson's Garden on View”
April 9, 2025
Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, Herbarium Plate 54 - Pansy, 2023, and Herbarium Plate 64 - Christmas Cactus, 2023. Archival pigment prints.
“Creating herbariums – flower scrapbooks made by pressing dried plants into the pages of a book - was a popular pastime in Dickinson’s time. She created 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, she 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.””
— Fine Books & Collections
LENSCRATCH: Interview, “Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand: This Earthen Door,” by Aline Smithson
October 21, 2024
© Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand, Herbarium Plate 61 – Purple Verbena (left) Herbarium Plate 63 – Purple Columbine (right)
“Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand have created an exquisite book, This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, published by Datz Press. This Earthen Door is a cross-disciplinary inquiry exploring renowned poet Emily Dickinson’s deep connection to the natural world. In brilliant, non-synthetic plant color, this book follows the chronology of Emily Dickinson’s original 66-page herbarium—a book of pressed plants made as a teenager.”
— Aline Smithson
What Will You Remember?: Inspiration at Photofairs NYC by Elin Spring
Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey at an Artist Talk about their Anthotype project & book This Earthen Door: A Reworking of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium sponsored by (at left) Rick Wester Fine Art at PhotoFairsNY. Every Anthotype was created using flora grown or referenced by poet & avid gardener Emily Dickinson. (Photo by Elin Spring)
“Whether in concept, through composition, or materials and methods (and often all of those), the most exquisite work was unique and personal. Each found ways to explore themes as old as identity and memory or as contemporary as climate change and technology.”
— Elin Spring
ARTnews: Q&A with Photofairs Founder Scott Gray by Karen K. Ho
September 8, 2024
A pigment print from Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey’s This Earthen Door, on display at Rick Wester Fine Art during Photofairs New York.
“Gray said This Earthen Door 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.””
— Karen K. Ho