Tarleton State University’s Department of Visual Arts and Design is presenting Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden at the Clyde H. Wells Gallery of Art from Jan. 12 to Feb. 8.
Doherty will present a public lecture — Tarleton Fine Arts Theater, 3 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7 — on her work combining art and scientific research.
For 15 years the Texasbased photographer has photographed the spaces and contents of seed banks around the world. In Archiving Eden she constructed a visual meditation on the planet’s botanical diversity by focusing on the aesthetics of seeds and the places constructed to conserve biodiversity.
Collaborating with renowned biologists and supported by a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, she began photographing seed vaults to examine their role and preservation efforts in the face of climate change, the extinction of natural species, and decreased agricultural diversity.
Locations in the series include the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the Agricultural Research Service’s National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation (Colorado); the Millennium Seed Bank (England); PlantBank; the Threatened Flora Centre and Kings Park Botanic Gardens (Australia); and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Norway).
The archives’ on-site X-ray equipment is routinely used for viability assessments of accessioned seeds. Doherty documents and subsequently collages the seeds and tissue samples stored in these crucial collections.
The visual power of magnified X-ray images springs from the technology’s ability to record what is invisible to the human eye, she said. “It illuminates my 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.”
Doherty was born in Houston and received a BA cum laude from Rice University and an MFA in photography from Yale University. She lives in Southlake and is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas.