Thank you for visiting PHYTOPIA. Leave us your feedback here and share your thoughts and experiences with your friends on social media.
Archiving Eden
Kernel of hope
In Archiving Eden, Dornith Doherty explores how stockpiles of seeds can evoke a sense of beauty and simultaneously encourages us to think about the massive efforts undertaken by people to safeguard biodiversity.
The project is an ongoing collaboration with renowned biologists and the most comprehensive international seed banks in the world. Utilising the archives’ on-site x-ray equipment that is routinely used for viability assessments of accessioned seeds, the artist documents and subsequently collages the seeds and tissue samples stored in these crucial collections. The amazing visual power of magnified x-ray images, which springs from the technology’s ability to record what is invisible to the human eye, illuminates considerations not only of the complex philosophical, anthropological, and ecological issues surrounding the role of science and human agency in relation to gene banking, but also of the poetic questions about life and time on a macro and micro scale.
Medium: X-ray prints
Year: 2008- present
Millennium Seed Bank Research Seedlings and Lochner-Stuppy Test Garden no. 4 Digital Chromogenic Lenticular Photograph, 79 x 36 inches; Digital collage made from x-rays captured at the Millennium Seed Bank (England) (simulation of color changes visible when viewing the work)
Epiphyte - Digital collage made from x-rays
Sweet Potato Clone - Digital collage made from x-rays captured at the USA’s National Center for Genetic
Kangaroo Grass - Digital Collage made from x-rays captured at PlantBank (Australia)
Red Yucca
Banksias - Digital collage made from x-rays
Banana Seed
Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Spitsbergen, Norway
Vault Interior, Svalbard Global Seed Vault Spitsbergen, Norway
Barley Collection, N.I. Vavilov Institute for Plant Industry St. Petersburg, Russia
About the Artist
A 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Dornith Doherty is an American artist working primarily with photography, video, and scientific imaging. Among her chief concerns is to actively visualize the philosophical, cultural, and ecological questions that are often left invisible when considering human entanglement in our rapidly changing environment.
Doherty was born in Houston, Texas and received a B.A. cum laude from Rice University and a MFA in Photography from Yale University. She currently resides in Southlake and is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas, where she has been on the faculty since 1996. Doherty’s work has been featured in exhibitions widely in the US and abroad at institutions including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX, among others. Doherty’s work has been featured by American Way magazine, Harvard Business Review, Hyperallergic, National Geographic, New Yorker: Photo Booth, Oxford American Journal, Oxford Literary Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, among others.
PREVIOUS EXHIBIT
Jungle Ghadi
NEXT EXHIBIT
Pandurang Khankhoje