Ghost Flowers: Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand Interviewed by Marta Werner
2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/edj.2023.a924672
ISSN1096-858X
Autores ResumoGhost Flowers:Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand Interviewed by Marta Werner Marta Werner (bio) Over the last three years, Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand have been making This Earthen Door, a work documenting their encounter with Dickinson's herbarium. The result of their artistic research is not a facsimile of the original, now furled within a faraway weave of time and space, or of its digital surrogate, but a wholly new and incandescent work of and for our time. To make This Earthen Door, Marchand and Sobsey came out of the dark room. They moved their studios outside, working en plein air in gardens in different latitudes, experimenting with anthotype, a delicate and nearly forgotten nineteenth-century photographic process of making images from emulsions of crushed leaves, stems, berries, petals—and light. Their "flower prints"—sixty-six unique images representing the sixty-six leaves of Dickinson's herbarium made by laying the negatives of the digital copies of that work on top of the pigmented paper—compose the color-wheel of her world. They possess an unearthly beauty and inhabit an uncanny temporality: Are they images of the herbarium's lost memories of the vernal earth of more than a century ago? Or are they after-images from the herbarium's dream of a world-to-come, a world, perhaps, without us? In Marchand and Sobsey's lyrical color-washes, each floral specimen—the crossed stems of the Oxeye-Daisy, the frayed leaves of Mad-dog Skullcap, the swirling roots of Common Smoketree—flickers with a hidden vitalism that affirms its quickened, entangled nature and its vulnerability and proximity to disappearance. Ultimately, the sunlight both creates and degrades the images: even when stored in near total darkness, both flower and print will fade to whiteness, the material will become immaterial. The tension between the intimate, sensory nature of the anthotypes and the advance of the spectral and anarchival both from deep inside them and from an Outside that never fully reveals itself is both a final source of [End Page 99] their beauty and an invitation to us to gladly forfeit a positivist, empirical response to Nature for a dilated, intuitive one. At last, This Earthen Door is an herbarium a'bloom in the dark mystery of the Anthropocene where color is still the substrate of the world. —Marta Werner MATERIALS & IMMATERIALS: A PARTIAL INVENTORY Sun • Dickinson • Time • Herbarium (digitized) • Seeds • Soil (potting) • Worms • Earth • Bees • Heat • Rainwater • Hoses • Gloves • Scissors • Shovels • Pencils • Brushes (foam) • Sponges • Money • Artist's tape • Permission • Patience • Collaborators • Computers • Mortar and Pestle • Pigments (plant) • Paper (acid-free, Strathmore) • Pigment inks (digital) • Paper (archival-digital) • Lemon Juice • UV light • Everclear • Vodka • Negatives, Positives (large) • Contact Frames • Scanners • Printers • Darkness • Reading Glasses • Moonlight • Intuition • Storage Boxes • Chance MARTA: The subject of your work is often the natural world and the philosophies and practices of collecting and displaying that shape our human views of nature. How did you find this focus? LEAH: My work has centered around archives and collections for over twenty years. I began working in museum collections by chance when a Tufted Titmouse crashed into my window. As a photographer, my first inclination was to photograph it, my second was to hold it. . . . That moment led me to work in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences where I was able to photograph bird skins. I fell in love with the specimens. My then Step-Uncle, John Fitzpatrick, an ornithologist, had worked at the Field Museum when I was a child, and I remembered watching him opening the endless, dark drawers where those beautiful, tiny creatures now lay silent. I imagined bringing them to light, reanimating them through photography. Later, I was awarded a residency at the Grand Canyon, and this opportunity led me to photograph in the national park's museum collections rather than in the iconic landscape. . . . What could I learn from the micro rather than the macro? What could I learn from the scientists, collectors, and researchers who deemed these plants and animal specimens important enough to collect, study, and memorialize? It was a natural progression to move from the national park's archive to other institutional archives: Thoreau's, Dickinson's...
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