Cig Harvey British, b. 1973

One colour fills the frame: a heavy golden cloth, rumpled, its seams showing, running out past every edge. Scattered across it, the remains of a cake. Piped rosettes of yellow buttercream, smears, crumbs, and hundreds of tiny sprinkles in red and blue and green. And near the middle, lying face up in the wreckage, a small plaster cherub with painted blonde hair and its mouth open.

The cherub was a cake decoration and is now a survivor. It is the only face in the photograph, it is about the size of a thumb, and it has landed the right way up in a landscape of ruined icing. Everything else is texture. The gold of the cloth and the gold of the buttercream sit within a shade of each other, so the eye goes to the sprinkles first and then, with a small shock, to the face.

The title says the cake fell from the sky and the picture agrees to the fiction without insisting on it. What is on the cloth is the aftermath of something, the something was a celebration, and it is over. Harvey shoots straight down so that there is no horizon, no scale and nowhere to stand. This could be a bedsheet or a banquet table or half an acre, and there is no way of telling, which is what not showing an edge is for.