Walden’s Way South

Robin Vuchnich ’14 mr knew of Henry David Thoreau much like all of us do: Mythic Northeastern literary figure. Resident around Walden Pond. Assigned reading. Noted naturalist. But one thing Vuchnich didn’t realize was just how much of a naturalist Thoreau was.

That was until about seven years ago, when Vuchnich joined up with a group of friends that included Marsha Gordon, professor and director of film studies at NC State, and Leah Sobsey, a North Carolina artist who specializes in cyanotypes. They were looking to do a project with some sort of archival collection. Enter Emily Meineke ’16 PHD, the fourth member of the group and a UC Davis entomologist who was working at the Harvard University Herbaria as a postdoc. She informed the team of this other part of Thoreau’s legacy that transcended his writing and was readily available to tap into as part of more than 640 images in a digital archival collection at Harvard.

“Thoreau collected hundreds of specimens during his time around Walden and Concord [Mass.],” says Vuchnich, whose master’s is in graphic and experience design and who owns the interactive art studio XO Immersive. “Because those specimens were [pressed and] preserved for 170 years, scientists now have a way to look at those and use them as a kind of way to collapse the time between then and now.”

Scientists and artists, in fact. With that interplay as its inspiration, the team went to work dreaming up In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers, an interactive art installation that opens at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design this week. It features data visualization, soundscapes and cyanotypes — blue photographic prints on paper or fabric — of those plant specimens that were once flourishing around Walden Pond but have since gone into decline or extinction due to climate change.

“It’s definitely a story of loss,” Vuchnich says, adding that the team wanted to lean into the specimens’ aesthetics in showing the reality of what is no longer at Walden. “When we’re creating these experiences, we need to point to celebrating biodiversity and the work we have to do to preserve it.”

The exhibition premiered at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2022, but now with it coming to Raleigh, the team has aimed to make the exhibit more immersive than before. “This version includes an interactive wall of flowers that float,” Vuchnich says. “You can move them with your body.”

In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers will be at the Gregg through January 2026. And that in and of itself delights Vuchnich and the team in thinking about Thoreau’s literary legacy.

“He probably would have had no idea,” she says, “that scientists would be using these in this way now and going into the future.”