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Lecture and Reception

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

About the Exhibition

This exhibition brings together This Earthen Door and The Blue of Distance, two bodies of work rooted at the intersection of art and science. In This Earthen Door, Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey draw from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, a book of pressed plants she collected from her garden; the artists grew and made sunprints from Harvard University’s digital archive of Dickinson’s specimens. Using the anthotype process, the artists reanimated Dickinson’s floral archive and explored its symbolism. Sobsey’s The Blue of Distance centers on herbaria and natural history collections, bridging art, science, and the humanities while addressing loss, climate change, and the ecological threats of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to 19th-century botanist and photographer Anna Atkins—the first woman photographer and the publisher of the first photographic book (1843)—Sobsey merges historical printing techniques with digital methods to connect past and present.

About the Artists

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey met in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute, where they studied photography. Their friendship grew due to their mutual interests in ecology and experimental photography. This Earthen Door was awarded the 2024 Lenscratch Art & Science Award. 

Amanda Marchand is an award-winning Canadian artist and educator living in New York. Exhibited internationally in solo and group shows, her work focuses on the natural world using an experimental approach to photography. Marchand has published 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 also published several artist books and the novel Without cease the earth faintly trembles (DC Books, 2001). Her work is in many private and public collections, such as 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, including the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Penland School of Craft, and Studios at Mass MoCA. Marchand is also represented by Traywick Contemporary and Rick Wester Fine Art.

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Leah Sobsey is an award-winning artist and Associate Professor of Photography at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of nature, science, and design while experimenting with installations and textiles. Sobsey’s books include 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 photographs and books are held in private and public collections across the United States, such as 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 numerous artist residencies, including 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 published 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.

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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.