Dornith Doherty

Opening Tuesday at the Spencer Museum of Art, the exhibition “Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World” examines the integral relationships between humans and plants through works by more than 50 historical and contemporary artists from the museum’s collection, loans and site-specific installations by four artists-in-residence.

Kicking off the exhibition is the Big Botany research symposium, beginning with the keynote lecture, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz of Tel Aviv University, at 5:30 p.m. March 27 in the museum’s auditorium. Art historian Giovanni Aloi of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and philosopher Timothy Morton of Rice University will give lectures April 11 and May 2, respectively. All lectures will be live-streamed through the museum’s YouTube channel...

Dornith Doherty’s photographic project Archiving Eden is a multi faceted approach to addressing the worlds concern of decreasing biodiversity and the extinction of natural species in the face of climate change.

For the past ten years she has collaborated with scientists at international seed banks around the world including banks in North America, England, Brazil, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, and Australia.

Doherty’s photographs include detailed images of highly secured isolated vaults set deep within the earth; doomsday facilities that act as human kinds final chance if the worst should happen and the flora of the planet was suddenly lost. Additionally, the project includes expansive landscapes, greenhouses, incubation chambers,
various laboratory equipment, as well as highly enigmatic collages made from x-ray images recording seeds at various stages of germination....

A black circle fills the frame; a dark void within which small white flecks float. These white specks are plant seeds captured with an X-ray, their ghostly white shells and tails caught in a black petri dish. The piece, by the artist Dornith Doherty, is titled Finite and is part of an ongoing series from her project Archiving Eden; the eponymous show is on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art until Jan. 14, 2018....

Acclaimed North Texas artist Dornith Doherty has been photographing seed banks around the world since 2008, and the capstone exhibition, Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden, has just opened at the Amon Carter. The show is a spellbindingly beautiful collection of 15 large-scale images, both of the seed banks themselves and digital collages from x-ray images Doherty took in the labs. Patron spoke with Doherty at the Museum the day before the August 12 opening.

PATRON: Your “Archiving Eden” project has consumed you for nearly 10 years—does the origin of this exploration date back to when you learned of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, the so-called “doomsday vault”?.....

Photographer Dornith Doherty spent nine years documenting remote seed vaults around the world — and the seeds inside them. She even got inside the so-called doomsday vault, in Norway, near the North Pole, designed to help preserve samples of botanical life in case of worldwide catastrophe.

Her large, ghostly images capture life inside seeds as small as a grain of sand.  You can see them in her new book, “Archiving Eden,” and in the show by the same name at Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

For our weekly State of the Arts, I spoke Doherty about how she makes her ethereal work. Here are some excerpts from our conversation...

Dornith Doherty Sees the Future in a Seed - The photographer, whose work is featured in a new exhibition at the Amon Carter, has spent the last decade visiting seed banks around the world....

In 2015, Syrian researchers made the first ever withdrawal from the Svalbard Global Seed Vaultto recover wheat, barley, and grass samples that had been lost when the Aleppo-based seed bank was destroyed in that country's civil war. That is exactly why the Svalbard "Doomsday Vault" exists. To date there are over 1,700 repositories like the one formerly based in Aleppo (which has since moved to Beirut), designed to function as natural safe deposit boxes for food crops and plant diversity in case of natural or man-made disasters....

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art presents Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden on view August 12, 2017, through January 14, 2018. The exhibition of photographs by North Texas artist Dornith Doherty intertwines science and art, showcasing the planet’s botanical diversity through 15 images from seed banks across the world. Admission is free.

...Today, we know that the wealth of seeds is our opportunity to provide sufficient food to the growing world population even under severe conditions due to climate change, Environmental destruction and bioterrorism. That is why more than 1400 seed banks around the world keep the seeds of innumerable useful and wild plants, some in cardboard boxes, others in liquid nitrogen...