"I view the landscape as a space for research and conservation, documenting land that is shifting or potentially vanishing."
Dora Somosi
Dora Somosi is a Hungarian-American lens-based artist whose practice centres on the natural world and alternative photographic processes. Working with cyanotype, hand-coated paper and embroidery thread dyed with foraged plants, she combines digital photography with tactile processes and traditions of handwork. Somosi's process relies on prolonged time spent in nature, and she regards the finished works as physical traces of that immersion.
In her ongoing series By Her Side, Somosi photographs trees that stood near the homes or studios of twenty-five pioneering women artists and thinkers whose practices were rooted in America and Europe and whose work has influenced her own. Among them are Emily Dickinson, Georgia O'Keeffe, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. The trees serve as witnesses to these women's lives, enabling Somosi to create portraits by proxy and trace their legacies. All these women shared a deep connection to the land and used their pioneering spirit to advance education and inquiry, as well as land conservation, preservation and appreciation. For Somosi, visiting the sites is a performative act that draws on photography's capacity to connect and memorialise: the women remain unseen, yet their connection to place endures. Back in the studio, Somosi translates the photographs into large-scale, hand-printed cyanotypes.
Somosi's most recent body of work, Mending, extends this tactile approach through acts of transformation and repair. Responding to irregularities produced by chemistry, light and water, Somosi stitches into cyanotypes rather than discarding them. Drawing on the principles of kintsugi and Hungarian women's handwork traditions, she uses embroidery and threads dyed with plant matter foraged from the locations she photographs.
Somosi's work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, Katonah Museum of Art, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Bolinas Museum and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her work is also held in the permanent collection of the Samek Art Museum. Somosi lives and works in Brooklyn and Upstate New York.