Lisa McCarty

VIDEO STILLS

PROJECT STATEMENT

As a part of the 2025 Poetry Walk, the entrance to the Museum has been transformed into a site-specific installation inspired by Emily Dickinson’s herbarium.

Created for the Emily Dickinson Museum by artists Lisa McCarty & D. Edward Davis, the installation features Emily Dickinson’s iconic white dress as a projection screen for images of the Poet’s herbarium. Over 400 images of individual flowers collected by Dickinson are shown as part of McCarty’s video projection, together with a haunting soundscape of hymns, drones, and birdsong by Davis. As a whole, the installation is inspired by Dickinson’s practice of attentively, and ecstatically, responding to elements of the living world through both her poetry and her herbarium.

Dickinson’s herbarium is held in the collection of Harvard’s Houghton Library. The catalog entry notes the approximate dates of creation being between 1839–1846. Sometime during this window, when Dickinson would have been between the ages of nine and sixteen, she collected, pressed, labeled, and arranged 424 flowers across 66-pages. Today this devotional book is over 180 years old. While it is securely preserved, it is extremely fragile and is no longer available to researchers in the original. And so I pieced it, with a flower, now reanimates the static reproductions the Library offers through its online catalog in lieu of direct contact with the original book. The title of the installation comes from the following Dickinson poem:

To love thee Year by Year –

May less appear

Than sacrifice, and cease –

However, dear,

Forever might be short, I thought to show –

And so I pieced it, with a flower, now

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