Unearthing: Two Artists Live in and Respond to Claude Monet’s Garden

Sarah Schorr and Elizabeth Tinglof

un·earth
/ˌənˈərTH/

verb
discover (something hidden, lost, or kept secret) by investigation or searching.

Inspired by overlapping time as artists in residency at the Maison de Claude Monet in Giverny France, artists Sarah Schorr and Elizabeth Tinglof began a visual conversation about balance prompted by time in the iconic garden of the painter Claude Monet. Since the time when Monet created the garden for his impressionist work, climate disruption has complicated the process of preserving his vision.

In Monet’s garden, opening the green gates to the water garden feels like stepping into a painting. The gardeners work year round to keep this pond in balance. In the onsite nursery, the precision of temperature, light, and humidity nurtures new growth. Too much water is dangerous to the germination process. What is the art of keeping a garden’s water in balance?

Drawn to this exploration of water, the dialogue that began in Giverny will be unearthed in two prototype spaces, each personal to an artist, as follows:

March 19, 2023 – Rough Play Projects, Joshua Tree CA, USA

This experiment takes balance as its starting point. In a newly constructed, temporary, greenhouse in the Joshua Tree Desert, the artists consider how water is distributed in the desert. What are the patterns and traces of water in this landscape? What are the markers of balance? Is balance an illusion? How do factors of human consumption and economic inequity disrupt the balance of water in the local ecosystem?

Schorr’s installation begins by filling recycled bottles and bags with water as vessels for her photographs. During her period in the desert, she will document how the photographs from her ephemeral field journal from Giverny change and distort as the paper and the landscape interact and transform with moisture.

Tinglof’s installation will expand on the abstracted renderings reminiscent of aerial topography she began while in Giverny. Through the use of fragmented imagery and the balance of abstracted shapes these paintings reflect how water segments the earth from above. Her use of precious metals and rubbed dry pigment on canvas give a sense of marks made for archival mapping.

April 7, 2023 – Holme Kunsthal, Aarhus, Denmark

Located between two large seas, Denmark has become even more vulnerable to flooding due to rising seas levels, increased rainfall and rising river levels as a result of climate change. While in recent years, periods of drought are also of note. In this experiment the artists will address water from the perspective of balance, containment and protection. Lead by what they discovered in Joshua Tree they will condense their visual collaboration to be contained in a free standing vitrine like “greenhouse” in Aarhus, Denmark.