Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
One white poppy sits just off-center, ringed by its own meniscus of light, the only bloom in the frame that has not surrendered its colour to the surrounding red. Everything else here is a decision about the surface: Cig Harvey lays her cut poppies onto black Rockport water and lets the water do the editing, so that the heaped scarlet at upper left reads as solid, almost upholstered, while the lower blooms thin toward dissolution, half-claimed by the dark. The title's parenthesis — (Sinking) — names the staging exactly. This is a tableau caught mid-verb.
What makes the picture contemporary rather than merely lovely is how deliberately it withholds the studio's usual cues. There is no vase, no table, no horizon; the water gives no scale and no edge, only a vertical field that could be a pond or a void. The trailing green stems, drawn out like loose threads across the bottom third, are the one element that insists these were arranged by a hand, then released. Harvey is working in the long line of the constructed still life, but she builds with chance — surface tension, reflection, the slow tilt of a flower going under — rather than against it.
Harvey, British-born and long resident on the coast of Maine, has made colour and memory the explicit subject of her practice, and the flower pictures are its most concentrated form. Reflections of the reds bleed into the black at right like an afterimage, so the photograph seems to remember itself even as you look. The single pale bloom holds the composition the way a rest holds a phrase — the pause that lets you feel everything around it falling.
One white poppy sits just off-center, ringed by its own meniscus of light, the only bloom in the frame that has not surrendered its colour to the surrounding red. Everything else here is a decision about the surface: Cig Harvey lays her cut poppies onto black Rockport water and lets the water do the editing, so that the heaped scarlet at upper left reads as solid, almost upholstered, while the lower blooms thin toward dissolution, half-claimed by the dark. The title's parenthesis — (Sinking) — names the staging exactly. This is a tableau caught mid-verb.
What makes the picture contemporary rather than merely lovely is how deliberately it withholds the studio's usual cues. There is no vase, no table, no horizon; the water gives no scale and no edge, only a vertical field that could be a pond or a void. The trailing green stems, drawn out like loose threads across the bottom third, are the one element that insists these were arranged by a hand, then released. Harvey is working in the long line of the constructed still life, but she builds with chance — surface tension, reflection, the slow tilt of a flower going under — rather than against it.
Harvey, British-born and long resident on the coast of Maine, has made colour and memory the explicit subject of her practice, and the flower pictures are its most concentrated form. Reflections of the reds bleed into the black at right like an afterimage, so the photograph seems to remember itself even as you look. The single pale bloom holds the composition the way a rest holds a phrase — the pause that lets you feel everything around it falling.