Cig Harvey
Emerald Drifters has been described as “a catalog of pleasures and heartbreaks.” The images, mainly shot on location around Harvey’s home in mid-coast Maine, explore the nature of sensual experience, focusing on the ephemeral qualities of light, pigment, and vision. The photographs offer a lush tableau of signature subjects—flora, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure in the landscape.
Responding to Harvey’s photographs, acclaimed writer and poet Ocean Vuong, writes, “...Cig Harvey’s work captures a lesser-understood—or even displaced—beauty. While others take photographs, Harvey, I’m convinced, takes something else. This “something else” can be defined by her relationship to the beautiful—what it is, what it can do, and, perhaps more pressing, how it becomes a vehicle for self-knowledge.”
Cig Harvey’s photographs and artist books have been widely exhibited internationally and are included in the permanent collections of major museums and institutions, including The Library of Congress; Yale University; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, among others. Her work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Ogunquit, Maine; and the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2018, she was awarded the Prix Virginia Laureate, an international photography award. And, in 2021, the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Maine in America Award. In 2022, she was the JP Morgan Highlighted Artist at Paris Photo. She lives in Rockport, Maine.
In a recent interview with the American curator Donna McNeil, Cig Harvey made an impassioned appeal for art’s role in opening oneself up. “If we feel more, I feel we will have more compassion,” she told McNeil. “I use all of the devices that I have as an artist to ask, ‘How can I get you to look? How can I get you to live more?”
