11 august 2023, Flor Linckens
Cig Harvey: the magic of the everyday
Until 22 September, Bildhalle presents an online exhibition on GalleryViewer by Cig Harvey. The intensely personal oeuvre of the British artist is characterised by large-format colour photography, which is often combined with poetry in her photography books. Her colourful and saturated work is infused with implicit narratives and is deeply rooted in nature — as a metaphor for our lives — with a focus on what it means to feel. She seeks the magical in the everyday, uses imagery and language to explore sensory experiences, and manipulates light and framing to tell her stories.
Harvey started working in a darkroom at the age of thirteen. Her early work consisted mainly of stylised self-portraits, later her focus shifted to her friends and family, partly to better understand her relationship with them. At the age of 26, she moved to the US for her master's degree, after living in Bermuda and Barcelona for a while. Today, she lives on a farm in Rockport, Maine with her husband and daughter. Nature features prominently in her work, alongside themes of family, motherhood and memories, inspired by magical realism.
In 2020, The New York Times asked her to keep a pandemic diary, in which she talked about her life in Maine. Harvey: “You have to work hard at living in Maine in late March. You have to make an effort at being happy when your day can peak with the orange light at dawn. Wear a pink scarf, cook with pomegranate seeds, paint a wall red, something to show you’re not defeated by the unrelenting winter. For the majority of the country, the start of April is glorious, spring bursting full of color and smells. But where I live, the trees are still completely bare. Everything is beige except when it snows. Our reward is the kaleidoscope of summer and fall and then, just like new mothers, we forget about early April, remembering only just how much we love Maine.”
For Harvey, photography is also a way of dealing with our world, which is sometimes beautiful and terrifying at the same time. For a number of works she was inspired by a near-death experience resulting from a car accident, which taught her how fragile life can be. In 2015, Harvey was mentioned in the article Why can't great artists be mothers? in the New York Times, in which she stated: “Art, in any form, demands that you turn yourself inside out. You must be obsessed for it to be any good. Art is mirroring and life became more complicated and richer in my opinion after [my daughter] was born. But the world was also much more terrifying to me.”
Harvey has published four sold out photography books and her work is part of the permanent collections of the MoMA, The Library of (US) Congress, Yale University and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Boston. She exhibited her work worldwide, with solo shows at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine. Until June of this year, her work was presented in a group exhibition in Fotografiska in Stockholm. Harvey has received several awards including the Prix Virginia Laureate, the Fine Press Book Associations Judge’s Choice Award for Best Book (for Eat Flowers) and the 2017 Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. She has been a finalist and nominee for numerous other photography prizes and honours, including the BMW Prize, the Estee Lauder Collection and the Karl Lagerfeld Collection at Paris Photo. Additionally, JP Morgan made her a Highlighted Artist at Paris Photo 2022. Her work has led to international collaborations with Ralph Lauren, Kate Spade, Bloomingdales and the Royal Shakespeare Company and it was featured in publications like Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Vice, Harper’s Bazaar Japan, Marie Claire, The New York Times and the BBC.
