Understory: Fleeda Griffith and the New York Botanical Gardens: 2026 - present

Building on our Emily Dickinson-inspired collaboration, This Earthen Door, (Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey), Understory takes up a new eco-feminist direction, again with plants as subject and material. This new and ongoing body of work explores the intersection of botanical archives, women’s labor, and ecological change through materially driven photographic processes. Drawing from the archives of the New York Botanical Garden, we re-engage the work of early 20th-century photographer, Fleda Griffith - a virtually unknown female photographer - reanimating historical materials (her negatives, prints, and lantern slides that form a large part of the early NYBG archive) using pigments derived from flowers.

Alongside this archival work, we have created new images in the NYBG Thain Family Forest in the Bronx from photographs we made ourselves. Here we utilize tree pigments (bark, leaves, nuts, seeds, flowers) gathered from both the forest and our own neighborhoods to tell the changing story of this old-growth forest set in one of the largest cities of the world.  The resulting collages reflect on time, fragility, and the shifting relationship between urban environments and old-growth ecosystems. Understory was featured as a solo booth at AIPAD: The Photography Show, April 2026 with Rick Wester Fine Art (below).