Cig Harvey is a photographer/writer whose practice seeks to find the magical in everyday life. Rich in implied narrative, Harvey’s work is deeply rooted in the natural environment, and offers explorations of belonging and familial relationships. She is the author of three sold-out books, You Look At Me Like An Emergency (Schilt Publishing, 2012), Gardening at Night (Schilt Publishing, 2015) and You an Orchestra You a Bomb, 2017).
About ‘You an Orchestra You a Bomb’:
In the steps of each ordinary day. I am waiting, ready for something to visually interrupt me. Something to make me gasp. Sometimes it is a natural phenomenon. Sometimes it is a gesture or a gaze. Sometimes it is the intensity of a color or the light. I feel jolted, awe-inspired, and urged to remember it. I photograph as a way to get closer to the moments that leave me breathless, as a way to stop time.
I have always experienced the world viscerally, but after a serious car accident in 2015, and the current affairs of last year, a heightened awareness of fragility permeates my new work. You an Orchestra You a Bomb looks at my relationship to life itself. It’s a work about the future, about paying attention to and appreciating the present. It makes icons of the everyday and looks at life on the threshold between magic and disaster. That life can change so completely in an instant, knocks the breath out of me a different type of gasp.
