“An explosion of color and life”
Working with vibrant color photography and creative nonfiction, British-born artist Cig Harvey explores what it means to experience life through all the senses.
The natural world surrounding Harvey’s home in rural Maine lies at the heart of her life and work. Acutely aware of the passing of time and the changing seasons, Harvey uses her camera to capture fleeting moments within the everyday and show how rich in color, light, and beauty seemingly trivial experiences can be. “I am interested in the magic of everyday life,” she says. “Look at this. Experience this. Feel this. The pictures say that time is the only currency.” And what could be a better metaphor for this than flowers – delicate, fragrant, colorful, and ephemeral?
The natural world is the thread that ties Harvey’s photographs together. Her signature subjects include flora, fruit, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure submerged in nature. Light, too, is a subject in its own right: the last glow of fading daylight, a ray of sunshine through a curtain, dancing points of light reflected by a disco ball, or the flickering flame of a candle. Like the vibrant colors of flower petals, light is fleeting, and Harvey intuitively recognizes the moment when both come together. Her photographs allow us to share in her rich, intense perception of color, scent, light, and human emotion. They open up a magical world, only to reveal that this magic is already present in the mundane. There is something familiar in what she evokes – something primal and instinctual that points to each person’s connection to nature.
For all their vitality, Harvey’s photographs can therefore be read as a kind of modern memento mori: luminous and vividly colored, yet reminders of the ephemerality of nature and life. Or, in Harvey’s own words: “It’s a reminder to pay attention to today and not put it off until tomorrow – ’cause tomorrow is different.”
Harvey lives in a farmhouse in Maine with her husband, Doug, and daughter, Scout.
She is the author of five monographs: You Look At Me Like An Emergency (Schilt Publishing, 2012), Gardening At Night (Schilt Publishing, 2015), You An Orchestra You A Bomb (Schilt Publishing, 2017), Blue Violet(Monacelli/Phaidon, 2021), and Emerald Drifters (Monacelli/Phaidon, 2025).
Her photographs and books are held in numerous permanent collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the George Eastman Museum, and the Library of Congress. Harvey’s first solo museum exhibition was held at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo in 2012, followed by a mid-career survey at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in 2019. Her work has also been exhibited at Fotografiska in Stockholm, New York, and Tallinn and presented internationally at Paris Photo, AIPAD, and Art Miami. She received the Prix Virginia in 2018 and the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Maine in America Award in 2021. In 2023, she was the subject of Eat Flowers, an Oscar-qualified short documentary directed by River Finlay. Her writing and photographs have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and New York Magazine.