Cig Harvey

I am delighted to announce a second collaboration with the gorgeous Two Ponds Press. CAKE is a continuation of the conversation started in Eat Flowers, released during the pandemic, and it feels celebratory in the wake of that difficult time. 

There are a baker’s dozen photographs, thirteen images bound in the portfolio, and an additional unbound print titled Feast. Also included is my signature mind map, letterpress printed by Art Larson of Horton Tank Graphics. The edition of 40 will be bound by four generations of binders, ten copies each by Gray Parrot, Claudia Cohen, Amy Borezo, and Gabby Cooksey. A veritable layer cake of extraordinary talent. Each binder was presented with the printed text block and given free rein to respond to the text and images. Design by Anneli Skaar.

Many of the cakes were made by my twelve-year-old daughter Scout, often impossibly precarious, decorated with wildly dripping abandon, even sent inexplicably floating on a river or into an inferno. These are confections gone wild, hinting at danger, decadence, and the ephemeral nature of beauty. As a series of images, along with the evocative text, they are a saucy celebration that serves as a metaphor for the passing of time—living and dying, full of the sweetness, bitterness, and unknowable elements that we all must navigate. It is at once a party and memento mori—a reminder to stop wasting time, agonizing over the past, and dreading the future. I implore you to embrace our one wild life with optimism while acknowledging its heartbreaks and complexities.

$6000 - For more information please contact me at cig@cigharvey.com or kenshure@twopondspress.com

Eat Flowers - A Fine Press Limited Edition Artist Book - SOLD OUT

This year I had the incredible experience of collaborating with the exquisite Two Ponds Press. We made a beautiful object.

Eat Flowers is a contemporary florilegium told through a calendar of blooms. Thirteen tipped-in 8" x 10" jewel-toned original C-prints, each accompanied by a letterpress printed vignette exploring what it is to feel through the language of flowers. Each unique copy of Eat Flowers includes a separate, ready-to-hang 11" x 14" archival pigment print of Wisteria, 2021.

Eat Flowers has been acquired by the following special collections libraries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Library of Congress, Bowdoin College, Colby College, Rollins College, University of Delaware, Stanford University, Wesleyan University, University of San Fransisco, Boston Atheneum, University of Delaware, Yale University and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

Text and photographs by Cig Harvey. This all-woman production also includes an afterword by Kat Stefko, illustration and typography by Anneli Skaar, type font by Ana Paula Megda, and printing by Leslie Miller at The Grenfell Press. The binding design and execution are by Claudia Cohen.

Click images above to enlarge and preview book.

Book trailer by Sam Brosnan

A book of deeply personal and lush photographs, drawings, and writing, Blue Violet is Cig Harvey's celebration of the natural world and the senses.

208 pages. 9.25 x 11.50 inches. Gorgeous printed cloth hardcover with French-fold style binding. Foreword by Jacoba Urist. Design by Jeanette Abbink.

Blue Violet is a vibrant meditation on the procession of seasons, sensory abundance, and the magic in everyday life. Part art book, botanical guide, historical encyclopedia, and poetry collection, Blue Violet is a compendium of beauty, color, and the senses. Plants, flowers, and our experience of the natural world are the threads that tie this unique book together. Exploring the five senses, Blue Violet takes the reader on a personal journey through nature and the range of human emotions. As with her previous three titles—You Look At Me Like An Emergency, Gardening at Night, and You an Orchestra You a Bomb—this book invites the reader to pause, laugh, cry, create, and become more aware of the natural world. Images and text in a variety of forms (prose poetry, recipes, lists, research pieces, diagrams) focus on immediate experience to understand the vibrancy of the senses on memory and feelings.

PRAISE FOR BLUE VIOLET, MONACELLI PRESS 2021

A nod to nature. There is poetry in nature: The British artist Cig Harvey's Tribute to the plant world in "Blue Violet" encompasses surrealist-style photographs, drawings, writing, diagrams and more. - Lauren Christensen, Senior Staff Editor, New York Times Book Review

Blue Violet beckons us to look at the beauty around us. Through prose, poetry, recipes and lush imagery, Harvey's work is a fierce reminder that there is joy to be found in the small details surrounding us, blink and you will miss them. - Gunslei Yalcinkaya, Aesthetica Magazine

A fluid and genre-defying work. - PEN America

Blue Violet drowns you in sensation. The imagery on these pages—the book itself—is ravishing. I was entranced by the visions that swell out of the pages. The cover has a purplish blue velvet twinkle to it. The uncut pages insist that readers slow down; 'flipping through' is not what you do with this book. Images overrun the pages, full-bleed style. Blue Violet is inordinately voluptuous for a photobook. One half expects to catch whiffs of the blooms Harvey describes. You’ve been warned. Open Blue Violet and prepare to be seized. - George Slade, Photo-Eye

A new and noteworthy book. - The New York Times

A glorious, sensual, poignant collection of botanical photographs, drawings and writings, which is part-art book, part-historical guide and part-poetry collection. - Financial Times

This book is a dream. - Stella Bugbee, Editor-at-Large, The Cut

Reveal is the newest Yoffy Press Triptych. In each Triptych, three artists are given a word to inspire the creation of a small book of work. The three resulting books are sold as a set, inviting the viewer into the collaboration to make connections between the projects and the overarching theme.

Reveal features Cig Harvey, Andrea Modica, and Debbie Fleming Caffery. It considers what the photograph exposes and what it keeps secret, what the viewer is meant to know and what the artist wants to hold close. The reveal is intentional or accidental, transformative or suggestive. And sometimes, the veil shifts just enough to give us a glimpse of something truly real, raw, and exceptional.

You an Orchestra You a Bomb, Cig Harvey's third monograph, is a vibrant and bold book. Possibly her most beautiful to date. It explores the photographer’s relationship with life itself. It is a book about paying attention to and appreciating the fragile present. 

You an Orchestra You a Bomb captures moments of awe, makes icons of the everyday, and looks at life on the threshold between magic and disaster. Cig has always experienced the world viscerally and this work shows a heightened awareness of the temporary nature of life.

Through breathless moments of beauty,  her images propel us to fathom the sacred in the split seconds of everyday.  Cig's photographs are interwoven with her intimate poetry in this hauntingly beautiful book.

Running Towards Us
Cig Harvey

Specifications
Format: Handbound by Cig, this accordion-style book can be displayed in one long line or as a traditional book form.
Size: 13 x 11-3/8 inches. 24 pages including colophon and title page.
Photographs: 16 original 10” x 10” C-prints, printed on Kodak Endura Luster paper to archival standards and mounted using acid-free archival adhesive. Book features some images that are sold out in all editions.
Text: 6 vignettes written by Cig Harvey and designed by artist Deb Wood. Printed letterpress with archival inks by Fox Island Press, North Haven, Maine. 
Cover: Wrap-around cover featuring a handcut paper title by artist Hannah Berta and original silkscreen print by Claire Donelly of Fox Island Press, North Haven, Maine.
Paper: The book is available in one of two beautiful heavy-weight paper options: Stonehenge Pearl Grey or Rives BFK white.
Box: The book is housed in a custom-made cloth clamshell box by artist Richard Smith, Camden, Maine.
Price: SOLD OUT

About the book
Limited edition of 14 books, each handmade, hand-numbered and signed by the author/artist Cig Harvey in Rockport, Maine, 2016.

Cig Harvey calls this book a love story that reveals the mysticism in the mundane. Her photographs and words explore the passage of time and show that home is wherever you look for it. The text is simple and beautifully letter-pressed in a warm grey allowing the photographs to take center stage. We become invested in the unfolding story of a home, a marriage, and motherhood.

The International Wall Street Journal said of the series, “Though the subjects and setting are familiar to us, we cannot help but feel that Cig Harvey has led us through the looking glass to a world of wonder. In the way that twilight is not quite day and not quite night, the photographs of Gardening at Night are stories capturing the unexpected yet oddly harmonious moments that surround us daily.”

The images are as much the unconventional, compelling narrative as the text. Not simply a collection of images interspaced with words, this is a complete book with the images taking up the telling of the story when the text leaves off. Ms. Harvey is correct: this is a love story but one that could only be told by an artist of her intensity and capability. The third in what one can only hope to be an ongoing autobiographical series, this is an astonishing book—at once an intimate view of an artist's life and the universal beauty of the natural world, color and shape, and love.

Gardening at Night is an exploration of home, family, nature, and time. Its predecessor, You Look at Me like an Emergency, captured journeys in finding and defining home, while Gardening at Night denotes settling into one’s landscape, and creating life where you are. 

The narrative throughout has a delicious element of magical realism—the viewer is left with the feeling of waking within a dream. On the other hand there is familiarity in what she evokes—something primal and instinctual that points to each person’s connection to nature. 

Seasons figure prominently as metaphors for the cycle of life, and interplays between shadow and light underscore the work. Each photograph and written vignette offers a tactile experience of things that ordinarily seem intangible: the secret life of birds, of barren winter trees, of the lake in spring time, or the girl in the window whose house you pass every day. 

The seventy-five jewel-toned images are arresting and weighted, but punctuated, as always, by Cig’s characteristic whimsical style. The result is an intensely personal collection that captures an experience of the world that is at once otherworldly and yet instantly familiar.

Forward by Vicki Goldberg // Designed by Deb Wood
Published by Schilt Publishing

Artist Books

Please contact Cig or Priscilla Juvelis for more details: pj@juvelisbooks.com

The Hope Chest
A untraditional love story told in twelve parts. Each section has a written vignette and either a single, diptych, or triptych photograph. All 24 photographs are 8 x 8" archival C-prints on Kodak Endura Luster paper and mounted on to Stonehenge White. Covers and pockets are made from Stonehenge Pearl gray paper and inkjet vellum. Book design and assembly by Cig Harvey and Claire Donnelly. Wrap-around cover is printed letterpress in gold by Wolfe Editions. Custom-made clamshell constructed by Caitlyn Thompson in the softest leather with gold leaf titling.

The Hope Chest is in the permanent collections of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Special Collections at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine: and the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

The Hope Chest is made in an edition of 15 with 2 artist proofs. All books are numbered and signed.
SOLD OUT

Tread Softly 
Tread Softly is an autobiographical story about loss and the struggle to find independence visually told through 24 original silver gelatin prints. Each image is individually printed by Cig Harvey on a Kodak single-weight semi-matte paper and toned in selenium 1:20 for archival purposes. The unique binding was designed in collaboration with artist Jessica Gellweiler and each piece is professionally handbound one-by-one by Cig using a beautiful, acid-free archival paper interleaved with a Japanese tissue. It is an absolute exquisite artifact.

Tread Softly is made in an edition of 15 with 2 artist proofs. All books are numbered and signed.
SOLD OUT