CURRENT EXHIBITION

ART EXHIBIT

Leah Sobsey

In the Wildness is the Preservation of the World

October 1 - December 31, 2026

This exhibit will be open for viewing on Fridays, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m., or by appointment.

Artist's Statement

For the last two decades, my photographic practice has centered on herbaria, natural history archives, and scientific collections. Working between the camera and the archive, the analog and the digital, I use cameraless and historical photographic processes to reconsider how photographs can function as both images and material encounters with the natural world. My work is rooted in the conviction that archives are not static repositories of the past; they are living sites through which we can understand extinction, ecological change, memory, and our increasingly precarious relationship with the natural world.

In my latest project, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, I continue my solo photographic practice working with Henry David Thoreau’s pressed plants. Originally conceived as a collaborative project using Thoreau’s nineteenth-century herbarium housed at Harvard University, In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers debuted at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2022 with collaborators Dr. Charles Davis, Dr. Emily Meineke, Marsha Gordon and Robin Vuchnich. Our collaborative exhibition and solo offshoots continue to travel to museums and galleries across the country.

In the mid-1800s, transcendentalist writer, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau methodically collected and documented the plants he encountered in and around Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau’s pressed specimens, journals, and meticulous observations record where plants grew and when they flowered. His collection is a botanical time capsule as Walden remains protected and mostly undeveloped.

Thoreau’s herbarium, over 600 specimens of loose sheets, is housed in Boston at the Harvard University Herbarium and available online as an open-access digital archive. His personal observations have become an accessible and valuable scientific record for scientists to study and glean new information about plants. Researchers can compare Thoreau’s nineteenth century findings with contemporary data to trace changes in plant distribution patterns and flowering times. Average spring temperatures are five degrees warmer than they were then. Notably, of the 648 plant specimens Thoreau collected, more than half are now rare or absent from the region. Many species have shifted their geographic ranges or altered their seasonal cycles in response to a changing climate.

While Thoreau was pressing plants for his herbarium, across the sea in England, British botanist and artist Anna Atkins was also collecting plant specimens. Widely considered the first book of photography, Atkins published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Sharing a love of the close and deliberate study of nature, Thoreau and Atkins created records of the natural world that continue to resonate more than 150 years later.

This installation brings this historical record into conversation with contemporary science, experimental photography, and environmental change. At its center is the cyanotype, a photographic process developed in the 1840s and made famous by Atkins through her botanical photographs. The cyanotype’s characteristic Prussian blue tone serves as both a historical connection and a conceptual framework. To look closely at these flowers is to look backward and forward at once. Thoreau’s plants and writing connect us to a 150-year-old landscape, asking: what will remain 150 years from now?

Thoreau’s greatest contribution to this project was his practice of sustained observation, rooted in his transcendentalist beliefs and commitment to simplicity. He walked, noticed, collected, recorded, and returned to the same landscape again and again, what we now call a citizen scientist. His work reminds us that close observation is itself a form of knowledge. Placing his
studies alongside contemporary scientific research, we can see environmental change across a scale that is otherwise difficult to comprehend. The specimens in this work are ghosts of a changing landscape, but they are not singularly a record of monumental loss. Plants are remarkably adaptive. Some disappear, while others migrate, adapt, or even thrive. The herbarium therefore becomes a record of resilience. It reminds us that the natural world is continually in flux. This installation is an invitation to consider our responsibility to the living
world we dearly behold and share.

Thoreau’s Flowers: A Meditation in Blue
Replica of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin 10 x 16’, digitized cyanotype fabric, 2026, POR Bench with custom pillow, 53x13”, $450

I invite you to sit, quiet your mind, and reflect within the airy space of Thoreau’s Flowers: A Meditation in Blue, a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin made from digital cyanotypes of plants that he collected in and around Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The installation brings Thoreau’s nineteenth-century observations into the present, transforming his botanical archive into a physical and poetic space for contemplation. Beginning in the 1850s, as the Horace Williams House was being constructed and British botanist and artist Anna Atkins was making the Prussian-blue-cyanotype famous, publishing the first book of cyanotype photographs, writer, naturalist, and transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau methodically collected and documented the plants he encountered around his Walden cabin.

His pressed specimens and journals form an extraordinary record of a landscape at a particular moment in time. Today, scientists are using these records to trace the ecological change that has occurred over more than 150 years. Of the 648 plant specimens Thoreau collected and pressed in his herbarium, more than half have disappeared from the region or become increasingly rare. Others have shifted their geographic ranges or flowering times in response to a changing climate.

“We need the tonic of wildness.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Thank you to science collaborators Dr. Emily Meineke and Dr. Charles Davis.
Deep gratitude always to Scott Howell, Lucas Sobsey Howell and Simon Sobsey Howell.

Special thank you to Anne Schroth at Red Canary Digital Fabric Studio for fabrication of Thoreau’s Flowers: A Meditation in Blue tent

Founded in 1999 by Anne Schroth, Red Canary is a digital fabric printing studio located in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. Over the years, Red Canary has collaborated with artists to produce digitally printed textiles and sewn elements for installations presented nationally and internationally including Jeffrey Gibson for the Venice Biennale, Kiki Smith, Portia Munson and many more.