Emerald Drifters Cig Harvey
by
OCEAN VUONG
excerpted from “Medicinal Estrangement: Cig Harvey’s Semiotic Transformations”
in Cig Harvey: Emerald Drifters [Monacelli/Phaidon, 2025]
While others take photographs, Cig, 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. “The clocks go back, giving an extra hour of sadness,” Cig writes, revealing the vagus nerve in this new series, which, for all its exuberance and sensual decadence, is centered on loss. The baroque fullness of these images, in all their rich color and geometry, elicits a felt absence, the phantom limb of elegy made excruciatingly present through an unbridled desire for the world, the living: a book of grief articulated through immense, insatiable want.
More than a project of knowing, this is a work of semiotic shifts. Cig’s recurring motifs, or obsessions, are well-trodden ones, and not just in photography but in literature, too: flowers, children, food, nature, interiors. Using symbols often ascribed to women as denigrating and minute, effete and decorous (and thereby useless), Cig, like Sappho, Plat,
Murasaki, and Woolf, like Maier, Mann, and Weems, leans into the “domestic” as inexhaustible subversion, taking the word’s original Latin root, domus, meaning “of animals,” and thereby the filth of birthing, rutting, and feeding — associations deemed beneath the offices of men — and centering them as potent and dignified nodes of imagination.
. . . Mostly taken around her home in Maine’s Midcoast, Cig charges images of rurality with vexed mythologies. The result is photographs that feel both deliberately made but also inevitably found. Her subjects — a spray of highlighter yellow pollen on a country road, a cluster of flowers nearly crushed into the ghostly fog of a car window, the occasional family member or neighbor, even a gnomic dusk-drenched
apple tree — appear thoroughly encountered, as if captured upon stepping through a clearing, revealing themselves seconds before the shutter clicks. But herein lies the fantasy of photography: what’s sublimely serendipitous is often carefully constructed, placed, seen and reseen. The whiteclad table strewn with flowers and elegant cakes set out for days, is meticulously built, its decay assisted by time, weather, the weak yet pervasive light of a full moon. In every sense of the word, these photos are made — but they are made in collaboration. Cig’s frames portray a convergence of human and natural action, not to synthesize or balance the two, but to show the possibilities when vision and composition amplify the magic of the natural world through memory. •
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American writer, poet, essayist, and bestselling author. His latest book is The Emperor of Gladness.
“I want you to have the same experience with this collection of pictures as I had when I first found the images—the feeling in the body that comes with bearing witness to something rare.”
Cig Harvey
August Sunset, Camden, 2024
Chive Blossoms, Rockport, 2021
2024
Cobalt Pigment, Rockport,
The Emerald Planet, Rockport, 2024
Fallen Swan, Northern Ring Road, Iceland, 2024
Gold Road, (Pollen), Camden, 2022
Hawthorn Blossoms and Camelias, (My Sister’s Garden), 2022
Icestorm, (Prisms), Goose River, 2022
Irises at Midnight, (Full Moon), 2021
January Swim, Rockport Harbor, 2023
The Ferns, Vinalhaven, (Emily), 2025
Pink Parrot Tulips, Rockport, 2023
Quince, (Ashley), Hope, 2025
Snow Storm Off Lake Chickawaukie, Rockland, 2025
Rockport, Maine, 2024
Snowy Owl,
The Universal Elixir, (Gold Pigment), 2024
The Spectrum, Iceland, 2024
The Golden Age, Rockport, 2023
The Living Table, Rockland, Maine, 2025
Flowers, When We Have No Words, Vinalhaven, 2025
White Phlox, (Madeleine), Eagle Island, 2023
Cig Harvey
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.