“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
~ Henry David Thoreau in “Walden”
By Elin Spring
At once life-giving and life threatening, water is the basis for all life on earth. In cahoots with atmospheric conditions, it morphs into an awe-inspiring range of states. Frozen, liquid or vaporous, as water transforms, our perceptions of it fluctuate in concert. Variations from the refractive, emerald translucencies in Walden Pond to the reflective, metallic opacity of the Baltic Sea have enchanted artist Sarah Schorr throughout her career. Her delicate, layered photographs elucidate water in ways that echo our own fleeting lives. In this way, the underpinnings of her work follow in the footsteps of Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, who held a spiritual belief that the natural world possesses a soul that mirrors ours. Schorr presents three luminous bodies of work in her solo exhibit, “Ephemeral Field Journal,” on view at Leica Gallery Boston through March 22nd, 2026.
“impermanence study” 2023, by Sarah Schorr. Photographic composite on etching paper with paint, water, and plants from Claude Monet’s Garden. Courtesy of the artist and Leica Gallery Boston.
“The Color of Water,” “Peace Studies,” and “Skywater” are each an approach to the perception of water from different lands: Aarhus, Denmark, Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, France and Walden Pond in Massachusetts. With distinctive styles, each combines photographs and watercolors in works suffused with wonder.
“depth charge” 2020, from The Color of Water series by Sarah Schorr. Photographic composite on etching paper. Courtesy of the artist and Leica Gallery Boston.
In “The Color of Water,” Schorr “reimagines the colors of twilight” with photographs of submerged cold-water swimmers like herself literally bathed in watercolors. To express the “fluctuations of emotion in color,” Schorr photographs her pigments while still fluid and curling within the water as a way to “invite the eye into the impermanence of the materials.” Like us, the water and the colors are transforming and evolving.
Feature Image: “peace study, silver purple” 2022, by Sarah Schorr. Photographic composite on etching paper with paint, water and plants from Claude Monet’s Garden. Courtesy of the artist and Leica Gallery Boston.
Schorr created her “Ephemeral Field Journal” during an extended period of observation in Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny, France. In the series, “Peace Studies,” she brings together fallen blossoms from the garden with gestures of paint derived from those flowers using water from the pond made famous by Monet’s “Water Lilies” paintings.
“peace study, green” 2022, by Sarah Schorr. Photographic composite on etching paper with paint, water and plants from Claude Monet’s Garden. Courtesy of the artist and Leica Gallery Boston.
The interrelationships and interdependencies of the garden’s water and floral life surfaced as meditations on climate change in “recognizing that our climate is always in a state of fluctuation.” With elegant symbolism, Schorr photographs her compositions while the watercolors are still suspended on paper, at once expressing the fleeting quality of light on a flower and the brevity of a human life in geologic time.
“peace study, purple” 2022 by Sarah Schorr. Photographic composite on etching paper with paint, water and plants from Claude Monet’s Garden. Courtesy of the artist and Leica Gallery Boston.
Schorr’s other project from “Ephemeral Field Journal” is a series of “cinemagraphs” that are not on view in this exhibit but can be found on her website and in her recently published book of the same name (Kehrer Verlag, 2025).
“the painted elements” 2025, from the Skywater series by Sarah Schorr. Photographic composite on etching paper with paint and water from Walden Pond. Courtesy of the artist and Leica Gallery Boston.
“Skywater” is a collaborative work-in-progress with Charles Stang, Director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), where Schorr is an Artist-in Residence. Inspired by Thoreau’s Transcendentalism and the waters of Walden Pond, they are studying temporal reflections of sky and water. Schorr’s sublime photographs of the sky during kaleidoscopic dawns, dusks, clouds and dazzling bright light are met with the redolent moods of her shifting watercolors. Sometimes, her photographs and watercolors appear on opposite pages in “book frames” she digitally assembles from her late father’s library. Temporality is further ingrained by faintly observable inscriptions to him. Framed in black, each work shines in contrast to an implied abyss of darkness. Skywater’s multilayered works rejoice the glorious ephemerality of life, environmental and human, as they reflect one another.
“the secret mechanics of the sky” 2025, from the Skywater series by Sarah Schorr. Photographic composite on etching paper with paint and water from Walden Pond. Courtesy of the artist and Leica Gallery Boston.
For more information, go to: https://leicagalleryboston.com/exhibitions/
We highly recommend seeing this exhibit in person!
Installation view of Ephemeral Field Journal by Sarah Schorr at Leica Gallery Boston. (Photo by Elin Spring)
Installation view of Ephemeral Field Journal by Sarah Schorr at Leica Gallery Boston. (Photo by Elin Spring)
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