This Earthen Door was presented at The International Emily Dickinson Society Meeting in July 2023 with Peter Grima and Marta McDowell.

Emily Dickinson International Society
Annual Meeting

July 21 - 23, 2023

The conference theme, “Clasp Hemispheres, and Homes,” comes from Dickinson’s poem “The Sunrise runs for Both – ” (M 355, Fr765, J710). In congruence with Dickinson’s “Both” 16 panels with nearly 50 presentations will delve into the relation between Dickinson’s mental and material interiors and her expansive embrace of wider, external spheres.

Dickinson and Ecologies
2025 EDIS + Wenshan

June 19 - 22, 2025

National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

We’re excited to be headed to Taipei this Summer for the 2025 Emily Dickinson International Society and Wenshan International Conference to lead a workshop and do a talk with our esteemed panel members, and exhibit our work from This Earthen Door.

‘Tis Nature’s buoyant juices: The Ecologies of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium — Workshop, exhibition, and artist talk with Marta McDowell & Peter Grima

Flowers Like Asia: Emily Dickinson and Flora Asiatica — Marta McDowell

This Earthen Door, Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Eco-feminism, and the Climate Crisis — Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey

The Forehead of a Hill: Emily Dickinson’s Botanical Exploration of the Mount Holyoke Range — Peter Grima

Plant-Based Photographic Processes
Workshop with Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey

Summer 2025 Session 1: May 24 - 30, 2025

Registration closes on: Friday, May 9, 2025, 12:00 pm

This workshop is about making art from garden plants using nontoxic, eco-friendly practices. We will cover several plant-based photographic processes, including anthotype, ancho-lumen, and chlorophyll printing, along with tataki zomé, a type of Japanese flower printmaking. After learning these simple and adaptable processes, students will be able to continue making plant-based art at home. We will cover the short but rich history of plant-based photographic processes, different ways to make pigment inks, methods for coating paper with plant colors, making digital negatives, and the best ways to preserve fugitive images (images that may fade over time). The workshop will include nature walks to collect plants around the Penland grounds.

Sun-Fused Imagery: Anthotype Workshop & PhotoAlliance Lecture
with Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey

Sunday, May 4, 2025

10:00 am - 2:00 pm PDT at SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA

Join Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey for a one-day Anthotype Workshop this May, inspired by the poetic legacy of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium. This immersive, hands-on experience invites participants to connect with nature while exploring one of photography's earliest processes, using plant-based emulsions and sunlight to create unique, organic prints.

A ticket to attend the May 4th PhotoAlliance lecture at Fort Mason with us and Ala Ebtekar is included with registration to this workshop.

Sun-Fused Imagery Workshop is presented in partnership with SF Camerawork.

In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss

Presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History

On view until May 20, 2024

Panel Discussion
Thursday, November 17, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss is an immersive multidisciplinary experience that marries art and science through a modern artistic interpretation of Henry David Thoreau’s preserved plants. Thoreau was prolific in his practice of collecting botanical samples and plants are important indicators of how our world is responding to climate change.  Long preserved in the Harvard University Herbaria, 648 specimens serve as the foundation of this new exhibition. The digitization of the specimens, and others in the Herbaria collection, are now allowing broader access to scholars and citizen scientists, in turn welcoming new domains of scholarship. 

The exhibition invites visitors to experience emotionally resonant connections to the profound loss of natural diversity caused by human-induced climate change. The exhibition urges us to ask, “What do Thoreau’s findings tell us about what plants are winning, and what plants are losing, in the face of climate change today?”

“Collections”

Duke
Sponsored by the Visiting Artist Series of the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

Artist Talk
Tuesday, October 25, 2022, 5:00 pm
A2666, Bay 10, Smith Warehouse

Leah Sobsey's multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of 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 the medium of photography.

Often partnering with scientists, she uses a historical, scientific, and artistic lens, to understand the connection to plant and animal loss as one indication of the larger climatological perils we face as a species. She is interested in creating dialog between art and science and has spent the last decade-plus photographing specimens from National Park and university museum collections across the country to understand climate change and species loss. Sobsey works in 19th-century photographic processes combined with digital technology with a specialty in plant-based printing techniques.