How poison ivy from a Chester County nature preserve ended up on the walls of a museum

Last summer, artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey arrived at Waterloo Mills Preserve — a swath of undeveloped land 15 miles west of Philadelphia — not expecting to look at poison ivy with reverence.

The preserve’s manager, Kevin Fryberger, introduced them to the vigorous native specimen whose berries are among the best food sources for migrating birds. He also told them the Poison Ivy Leaf-miner Moth (Cameraria guttifinitella) gets its nutrition exclusively from it.

On that trip, and on subsequent trips in the fall and winter, they gathered the leaves and twigs of chokecherry, flowering dogwood, sassafras, tulip poplar, and 10 other native trees. They also gathered 10 kinds of invasive species — including privet hedge and Norway maple.

And a greater appreciation for the beautiful interdependence of creatures and vegetation.

Unlike plein air painters who travel to scenic places, open their tubes of paints, and reproduce landscapes on their canvases, these women carried the local materials back to their studios to render the landscape, or some version of it.

Marchand and Sobsey ripped up the preserve’s leaves and pounded the petals of flowers they found. They rubbed and painted these natural pigments onto paper and produced panes of pure color.

The transformed art material, created from the leaves and flowers, became the artwork.

And in all of this, they found a spiritual guide in the poet Emily Dickinson.

During the pandemic lockdown, Marchand, a Canadian photographer, book artist, and educator based in Brooklyn, and Sobsey, a photographer, educator, and gallery director based in North Carolina, became obsessed with Dickinson’s plant album also known as an “herbarium.”

Begun by Dickinson almost 200 years ago, the herbarium’s 66 pages are packed with 400+ specimens of pressed plants. Housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the book is too fragile to be held or examined.

Dissatisfied with the online scans, the women, who became friends as graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute, decided to reconstruct it. To that end, they identified, collected, and grew the 66 species featured in Dickinson’s album.

In addition to learning about the plants that the poet preserved, they also used them to produce artworks using the 19th-century techniques of ink-paint making and solar printing. They laid out the digital negatives of Dickinson’s herbarium pages, taken from the online archive, on specially treated paper and exposed them to the sun for time periods varying from one day to four months.

“[It’s like] your backyard is your dark room,” said Marchand, “… but some take two months, and so you’re really tending to them in this extreme way, where the family might be involved in rushing things in and out of rain storms.”

They made their way to Waterloo Mills when the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum offered to host an exhibition of the artists’ creations and commissioned them to produce two site-specific, Dickinson-adjacent works.

One of the commissions, Talk not to me of Summer Trees, is composed of 56 color prints, derived from 14 tree species, arranged as a grid on a Brandywine museum wall.

Named after a Dickinson poem, it effects a seasonal clock: the plant material Marchand and Sobsey gathered in the summer months (when the trees are full of their green chlorophyll hue) are arranged on the top tiers. The fall and winter specimens, marked by the reddish anthocyanin pigment at its strongest, are displayed as the bottom prints.

Looking closely, viewers can detect residues of the pulped and mushed plant material — as if what remains is the essence or soul of the former leaf, and former flower, leaving the viewer with, as Dickinson writes, “The foliage of the mind.”

Collectively, the varied panes of pale yellow, deep greens, and pink-brown-reds have “a real presence in a way that color typically doesn’t … there’s something so alive about the[se] colors … because it’s just pure pigment,” Sobsey says.

The second commission is Estranged from Beauty None Can Be.

This work is composed of 10 vertically mounted sun prints. Produced from natural materials found both at the Brandywine preserves and in Dickinson’s Amherst, Mass., the prints (also called “anthotypes”) are elegant silhouettes of bush honeysuckle, orange daylily, and other non-native species that infiltrate the preserves and other areas in the Delaware Valley.

Sobsey said producing the natural hues for the pieces made her feel giddy, “you know, like being a kid and seeing what color would come out.”

For both artists, the tactile messiness of this art making was gratifying, and the experimental practices also produced a sequence of surprises.

“A bloom in the early stages is going to [make the pigment] look different than [pigment made from] a bloom at its end stage. And so even those little moments are going to shift color,” Sobsey said.

Both commissions are featured in the ongoing “This Earthen Door: Nature as Muse and Material” exhibit at the Brandywine Museum of Art. The exhibition is a celebration of the museum and the Brandywine Conservancy, a land preservation effort that has helped facilitate the permanent protection of several properties totaling 70,200 acres in the region, including the Waterloo Mills Preserve.

A visit to the exhibit feels like lingering in the paint box of spring, summer, and autumn’s palette.

And even though the exhibit is complete, Sobsey still keeps scraps of paper in her pockets when she goes for walks so that she can take “a little petal and rub it to see what color comes out.”

“These colors are in front of our face all day,” said Fryberger. “Every day, but no one ever sees them … but once you see it, you can see it everywhere. It’s all there.”

“This Earthen Door: Nature as Muse and Material” runs through Sept. 7 at the Brandywine Museum of Art, 1 Hoffmans Mill Rd., Chadds Ford, Pa. www.brandywine.org

The entire body of 101 works can be viewed at Rick Wester Fine Art in New York City.