This Earthen Door: Nature as Muse and Material at The Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art
Spring-summer 2025
Along with existing works from this series, Leah Sobsey and I partnered with the Brandywine Museum for one year to create two installations wedded to place and the conservancy mission of the museum.
This Earthen Door: Nature as Muse and Material is a remarkably immersive, cross-disciplinary exhibition focused on nature. The exhibition is the culmination of an almost five-year project of artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey. Combining natural materials with historical and contemporary photographic processes and inspired by a book of pressed flowers—known as an herbarium—created by renowned poet Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century, Marchand and Sobsey utilize pure pigments extracted from flowers to make a vibrant series of plant-based artworks. The resulting exhibition is a kaleidoscope of colors comprising over 50 works….
The artists also created two site-specific pieces created by the artists expressly for the exhibition that highlight the Brandywine Conservancy’s environmental stewardship efforts and honor Brandywine’s mission, history and future. The first site-specific work, “Estranged from Beauty – none can be,” is a grouping of 10 anthotypes of invasive species found in the Brandywine Conservancy’s 170-acre Waterloo Mills Preserve, located in Easttown Township, Chester County and Newtown Township, Delaware County. Exploring the duality of these flowering plants, the artists celebrate their beauty while underscoring the danger they pose to the local ecosystem. The second site-specific work, “Talk not to me of Summer Trees,” is a chromotaxy featuring 56 panels representing the pure color extracted from 14 tree species from Waterloo Mills Preserve, capturing the pigments of the leaves in both summer and autumn.”
- The Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, PA