# The Space Around the Still: Meditations from Claude Monet’s Water Garden December 26, 2024 [ Sarah Schorr ](/people/sarah-schorr) Edited by [Rachael Petersen](https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/people/rachael-petersen) > The passing cloud, the cooling breeze, the abrupt squall, the wind that gently blows then suddenly strikes, the light that dims and returns; so many sources imperceptible to the untrained eye and that disfigure the water’s surface and transform its colour. - Claude Monet ![Gif of flowers in a pond by sarah schorr](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2025-01/touchinaflood_Smaller.gif) *Figure 1. Touch in a Flood.* Sarah SchorrEnvisioning a waterscape to observe the reflections of plants, the French painter Claude Monet designed his famous garden when he moved to Giverny, France, in 1883. His water garden generated a color palette for impressions of light and time. As a visual artist with a fascination for the contemplative potential of water, Monet’s space compelled me to create new images. Over the last four years, I made a body of work called [*Ephemeral Field Journal*](https://sarahschorr.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=49550&Akey=48347V9L&ajx=1#!Group1_Pf197833) in Monet’s gardens through fellowships and artist residencies with the Terra Foundation of American Art and The Versailles Foundation to visually explore climate change through an examination of the beauty and fragility of plants and water in this iconic place. My experiences in Giverny helped me to understand and visualize the water garden as a creative, living laboratory for seeing. In the context of my [*Ephemeral Field Journal*](https://sarahschorr.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=49550&Akey=48347V9L&ajx=1#!Group1_Pf197833) project, the water garden provides a reflecting pool for witnessing the vulnerability of the natural environment as the climate changes. ![sarah schorr in boat monet](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2024-12/Image2_Schorrinboat_reduced.jpg?itok=ejqlOHoO) Figure 2. Schorr photographs Monet’s water garden in Giverny, France. Image credit: Sophie WarnerBefore I traveled to Giverny, I had planned to make photographs on medium format film. These project plans shifted as I sensed that the garden’s tranquility stemmed from subtle breath-like movements of the landscape. Tiny waves with the outlines of water bug footprints quivered in the pond, creating a rhythm in the visual experience. As an artist-researcher, my work has focused on the continual evolution and transformation of photographic methods and theory. Some of the artworks inspired by my time in Giverny are called cinemagraphs. My cinemagraphs are created by stitching together color samples painted on handmade paper “*en plein air*” (outdoors) with digital files in a post-production composite, as seen in Figures 1 and 3. Technically, they fall somewhere between a still image and a video. They are small .gif files made to mirror the gestural notes of the microscopic movements.. ![Gif showing artwork by Sarah Schorr](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2025-01/SMALLER%20GIVERNEYWALKSONG_SMALLER%20%281%29.gif) *Figure 3. Giverny Walk Song.* Sarah SchorrDuring my time living and working in Monet’s garden, I gradually started to move differently around plants. Picking flowers is forbidden in Monet’s garden. Instead, I had daily rituals of collecting fallen flowers in the morning and evening. Transferring injured flower petals is a delicate endeavor—it’s part of the slow mode of observation and practice that has become particular to this place for me. The tactility and translucence of the fibrous plants in natural light reminded me of the early practitioners of cameraless photography like Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who said she was making “impressions of plants” by subtracting the light around the form of plants. Going back even further, Elizabeth Fulhame (1759-1810) was engaged in developing the chemistry for creating light-sensitive photograms. As seen in Figure 4, I was inspired by these early light-processing pioneers as I experimented with photographing wet paint to conjure the liquidity of plant coloring in natural light. ![sarah schorr art work in progress](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2024-12/Image4_process.jpeg?itok=Wag5eubo) *Figure 4. Work in progress in Schorr’s Giverny studio.* Sarah Schorr.Although I am not a gardener, when I read [Rachael Petersen](https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/people/rachael-petersen)’s piece “[Towards a Vegetal Ressourcement: Reviving Gustav Fechner’s Plant Souls](https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/05/20/2024/towards-vegetal-ressourcement-reviving-gustav-fechner’s-plant-souls)” and learned about Gustav Feicher’s notion that humans lack the patience to observe the movements of plants, I recognized the heightened and quiet way of seeing that I experienced while in Giverny. This is the level of attunement that I strive toward when “thinking with plants.” Timescales are paced to each specific species. When I visited the garden at different intervals of the day, the water lilies seemed quite animated compared to other flowers. They closed tightly into a bud shape at night and stretched open in the midday. However, these movements and timescales are also impacted by changes in the environment. Last year, when I visited in November, the water lilies bloomed dramatically late into the fall. One day, the temperature fell precipitously. That night, the water lilies did not close. Head Gardener Jean Marie Avisard described the water lilies as simply “*Figés dans le temps”* (frozen in time). I came to understand that Avisard was communicating that the fall frost had come so fast that it had destroyed the flowers’ motility. I am captivated by how the current gardeners interpret Monet’s color vision by adapting the garden to environmental changes in real time. When the gardeners cut the water lily pond back for the year, they gave me a “frozen” water lily to examine in my studio. ![A work of art Impermanence Study by Sarah Schorr.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2024-12/Image5_ImpermanenceStudy.jpg?itok=AMp0tLbW) *Figure 5. Impermanence Study.* Sarah SchorrAs I arranged the water lily for the still life (*nature morte* in French) in Figure 5, I thought about how photographs have also been described as frozen time. Susan Sontag wrote, “Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” Of course, photographs are never entirely still, either. Printed photographs fade. Digital files degrade and refresh. Yet, understanding [the impermanence of photographic images](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10144167/1/Impermanence.pdf) also requires taking time to observe the space around the perceived stillness. After I left Giverny, I tucked the water lily into my journal. When I arrived in New York City, I sent the semi-flattened water lily through a printing press. As I examined the faint sculpted form in Figure 6, I was trying to decipher and record the information that it contained about this moment in the garden and the climate. On soft paper, my water lily had transformed again, and the embossment held tiny fragments of the garden. In the negative space distilled by the frost and the bacterial imbalance, there was still beauty. ![Imprint of a water lily from Monet’s garden. Sarah Schorr.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2024-12/Image6_embossedlily_reduced.jpg?itok=FKkSmhGO) *Figure 6. Imprint of a water lily from Monet’s garden.* Sarah Schorr--- Works from *Ephemeral Field Journal* will be exhibited at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSRW) with an artist talk on January 27, 2024. My forthcoming book, *Ephemeral Field Journal: Climate + Love in Claude Monet’s Garden,* published by Kehrer Verlag, will come out in the Fall of 2025 with the essay “Water, Souls, and the Motions of the Stars” by Charles M. Stang, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions and Professor of Early Christian Thought. See also:- [ Art ](/topic-tags/art) - [ Ecology ](/topic-tags/ecology) - [ TWPF Blog Page ](/programming-threads/twpf-blog-page)