curatorial projects.
Sharon Lee Hart:
Tracing the Impermanent, Naming the Irreplaceable
Curated by Sophie Bonet
The Frank C. Ortis Gallery
Pembroke Pines, FL
Feb 8-May 18, 2024
In the work of Sharon Lee Hart, photography becomes ritual. Her camera-less processes—fragile, intimate, and alchemical—merge environmental observation with material experimentation, revealing the quiet relationships between impermanence, place, and care. Across two recent series, Irreplaceable (2024) and Dark Tracing (2023), Hart makes visible the unseen forces shaping our ecosystems, and offers a form of witnessing that is both poetic and political.
In Irreplaceable, Hart revives the 19th-century anthotype process, using natural pigments—plant juices, fruits, flowers, roots—to create photographic prints developed through sunlight. This technique, pioneered by Mary Somerville and others in the early days of botanical science, was once used to record the colors and shapes of plants with ephemeral delicacy.¹ Hart adapts this method to contemporary urgency: her portraits of Florida’s endangered flora and fauna are not fixed representations, but fugitive images—images that may outlast the very beings they portray.
Figure 1. Sharon Lee Hart, from the Irreplaceable series, 2024. Anthotype on paper. Photo by Zachary Balber. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines.
The golden haze of turmeric, the deep stains of beetroot, the soft purples of butterfly pea—each pigment carries with it the specificity of origin, process, and temporality. The artist forages many of these plants from her yard or kitchen, creating site-responsive prints that are both elemental and ephemeral. The image of a Florida Panther, its form emerging from a luminous veil, becomes not just an aesthetic impression but a haunting memorial-in-progress—reminding us, as environmental theorist Thom van Dooren suggests, that extinction is not an event but a slow unraveling of entangled worlds.²
These portraits are not merely images of species; they are gestures of devotion. Hart photographs her subjects in their native habitats or at local conservation organizations, honoring their vulnerability without spectacle. The inclusion of plants like the red morning glory endemic to Miami-Dade County’s pine rocklands, or threatened species such as the Loggerhead Sea Turtle, underscores a bioregional ethics. In their making and materiality, these works ask: How do we see what is vanishing? How do we hold space for what cannot be replicated?
Where Irreplaceable marks the light-drenched disappearance of land-based life, Dark Tracing turns toward the sea and the nocturnal. Created with light-sensitive paper, sea salt water, and tea brewed from sargassum seaweed, this body of work captures the rhythmic gestures of waves spilling across sand after dark. Without a camera, Hart places the paper directly on the shoreline, allowing ghostly traces of the sea to inscribe themselves through contact. The resulting photograms are spectral—abstracted seascapes made not by sight, but by touch, tide, and chemical reaction.
Figure 2, 2b. Sharon Lee Hart, from the Dark Tracing series, 2023. Photogram on light-sensitive paper, stabilized with sea salt water and sargassum tea. Courtesy of Sharon Lee Hart.
Sargassum, a floating brown algae, plays an important ecological role but has proliferated in recent years due to warming waters and pollution. Hart’s decision to gather, steep, and incorporate the seaweed into her photographic process is more than conceptual—it is a material act of entanglement. In the words of Donna Haraway, it reflects a form of “staying with the trouble”: choosing to dwell within damaged landscapes, to collaborate with them, and to tell their stories.³
The seashore becomes a liminal collaborator—a boundary space, always in motion, shaped by erosion, tidal flux, and climate disturbance. Dark Tracing embraces this instability. Its prints are not fixed images but environmental collaborations, bearing the marks of their time and place. The use of sea salt as stabilizer nods to both archival preservation and the saline composition of tears—a subtle gesture linking mourning with memory.
Together, these series reframe photography as ritual ecology. In Irreplaceable, Hart documents the threatened; in Dark Tracing, she gives form to the shifting presence of the more-than-human world. Both invite us to rethink our relationship to image-making—not as acts of capture, but as acts of care. Hart does not seek permanence. She offers something rarer: the possibility of intimacy with the fleeting.
In an era marked by ecological loss, Sharon Lee Hart’s practice asks us not only what we are losing, but how we choose to witness it. Her work is an invitation to trace what remains, to name what matters, and to stay—quietly, attentively—with what is irreplaceable.
Notes
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Ann Thomas, Beauty in the Shadows: Mary Somerville and the Anthotype Process, in The Nature of Photography (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2018).
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Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
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Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.
Bibliography
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Thomas, Ann. Beauty in the Shadows: Mary Somerville and the Anthotype Process. In The Nature of Photography. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2018.
van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.