Cig Harvey: Emerald Drifters

Cig Harvey: Emerald Drifters by Aline SmithsonMay 16, 2025

©Cig Harvey, Emerald Drifters, Book Cover, published by Monacelli/Phaidon

I once commented that we all want to live in Cig Harvey‘s world, a world of color and velvet and flowers and cake, sumptuous and emotional, where there is a particular richness to the every day. But the truth is, we DO live in Cig Harvey’s world, but we don’t work as hard to unearth the wonder that is before us. In some ways, she is an archeologist of beauty, carefully excavating and uncovering the layers of aesthetic and emotional significance in her subjects. Her astute powers of observation, plus her ability to infuse personal and emotional narratives into her work, make her photographs resonate on deep levels. Harvey’s visual language encourages a more profound connection to the world and its inherent beauty, leaving us with an ache and a longing for more.

Fortunately much of her excavation is wrapped up in emerald satin, or could it be taffeta, and offered up in her new monograph, Emerald Drifters, published by Monacelli/Phaidon. Harvey has always been a descriptive photographer and writer, not only in the subject matter, but how she speaks to being alive. Emerald Drifters is far more than stunning images, it takes us on a journey, with essays that poetically describe color, and charts that take us through ways of seeing. The afterword of the book is an essay written by the critically acclaimed author Ocean Vuong, the perfect bookend to a personal, sensual, and exquisite monograph.

As the publisher writes: Emerald Drifters is an urgent call to live, a primal roar reminding us that time is the only currency. The pictures are about mortality, a screaming alarm, a battle cry telling us not to wastea second. Be here, now. Experience this. Feel this. The experience the viewer has should be the same as when I find the images in the world—a feeling in the body, a witness to something rare. Emerald Drifters argues the importance of color and beauty in our lives. It explores sensual experience, focusing on the ephemeral nature of light, pigment, and vision. The photographs are lush tableaus of signature subjects–flora, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure in the landscape–accompanied by prose vignettes on the science and art of color with an essay by the incredible Ocean Vuong. Emerald Drifters is a catalog of pleasures and heartbreaks.

Available for purchase worldwide from Phaidon. Or head to your favorite local bookstore to request a copy. Cig is also offering a Special Edition with a print here.

An interview with the artist follows.

©Cig Harvey, Spread from Emerald Drifters, published by Monacelli/ Phaidon

©Cig Harvey, Spread from Emerald Drifters, published by Monacelli/Phaidon

Cig Harvey is a British-born artist and writer who lives in Maine, USA. She is represented by the Robert Mann Gallery in New York, Peter Fetterman Gallery in Los Angeles, Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, Dowling Walsh Gallery in Maine, and Bildhalle Gallery in Zurich and Amsterdam. Harvey has published four sold-out books: You Look At Me Like An Emergency (Schilt Publishing); Gardening At Night (Schilt Publishing); You An Orchestra You A Bomb (Schilt Publishing); Blue Violet (Monacelli / Phaidon) now in its fifth printing. Her most recent book, Emerald Drifters, was published by Monacelli / Phaidon in spring 2025.

In 2012, Harvey had her first solo museum show at the Stenesen Museum in Oslo. In 2018, Harvey was awarded the Prix Virginia Laureate, a highly esteemed International Photography Prize. Her work has consistently been recognized, with notable mentions including being a finalist for the BMW Prize, the Karl Lagerfeld Collection at Paris Photo, the Clarence John Laughlin Award, and the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. She has also been a nominee for the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, the Santa Fe Prize, and the Prix Pictet.

In 2019, Harvey opened a mid-career solo exhibition of her work at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine. This site-specific exhibition was a transformative experience. Spanning the entire museum and incorporating over eighty photographs, visual text, and neon signs redefined how Harvey presents her work. It invited active participation and engagement from the audience. In 2021, the Farnsworth Art Museum awarded Harvey The Maine in America Award, recognizing those who have made outstanding contributions to Maine’s cultural legacy. Her peer recipients include artists such as Berenice Abbott, Katherine Bradford, and Louise Nevelson. A museum exhibition, short-form documentary film, educational programs, and the acquisition of her work, in 2021, added to that honor.

In 2022, Harvey was honored as a J.P.Morgan Laureate at Paris Photo. In 2023, Harvey received the Visionary Award, a biennial award by Maine Media to recognize and celebrate artists making extraordinary contributions to the field of visual arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums worldwide. Harvey’s work was exhibited at the Fotografiska Museum in Sweden in 2023 and then in New York and Estonia in 2024. Following its publication in March 2025, her recent monograph, Emerald Drifters, has been featured by the Virginia Quarterly Review and The New Yorker.

©Cig Harvey, Apple Tree (Last Light), from Emerald Drifters, published by Monacelli/Phaidon

A: Congratulations on Emerald Drifters! Before we talk about the book, can you share a little bit about yourself? What’s a typical breakfast? What’s your favorite smell? What’s your favorite scene in a book? What is something magical that we don’t know about you?

C: Thank you Aline. I’m so happy to be talking with you. Ok so every morning, I make a poached egg on toast with a pinch of salt. And every morning, I eat it shuddering with pleasure, like it’s the first and only breakfast in the world. My favorite smell? I have so many. The smell of garlic, onion and sage sauteing in a cast iron. The smell of the earth, first thing in the morning of damp soil, ocean and fog. And lilacs, I wait all year for them and when they finally bloom, it feels like the first fragrance ever. Spring has a smell. Maine is a state of wonderful smells.

Books, where to start? Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy shaped the way I write. I love the writing of Ocean Vuong. His new book, The Emperor of Gladness is mindblowing. I also love Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, and Lorrie Moore. Let’s see, something magical… I hang my entire house salon style, floor to ceiling, with art trades, thrift store finds, collected pieces. Even in the bathrooms and kitchen all the walls are hung in this style. I don’t measure anything. I don’t plan any of it out. I just bang a nail in the wall about two inches from the last piece and keep adding. There’s always enough room for more. I rarely hang my own work, I love being surrounded by other people’s artwork.

©Cig Harvey, Common Frog, from Emerald Drifters, published by Monacelli/Phaidon

A: Emerald Drifters is not only a love letter to color, but it’s an examination of life and death, of history and revelations, and the sumptuous and sublime. When did you establish a plan for how the book would unfold?

C: I never set out with the thesis to make a book about living and dying. I didn’t set out knowing this would be a book about color. I typically spend the first year or two of a new body of work, in a very intuitive way, photographing and putting all the work that interests me in one place. Then after I have gathered a mass of photographs, say 50 or 60 images I am interested in, I print them, put them on the wall and try to figure out what they’re saying to me––what’s conceptually coming through. I look at what I am writing and try to figure out what it is trying to tell me. I look for connections between the two, pictures and the text, sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it isn’t, but there is always a connection. Once I find the connection, I make images with more specific intention. In the case of Emerald Drifters, once I knew that I was writing about color––I asked myself, which colors am I missing, that kind of thing.

I love books so my end goal is always a book but I never set out with a concrete idea for what the book will be. It’s always, make the work first, figure out what it’s saying, and then that becomes the book.

©Cig Harvey, Dark Cake, from Emerald Drifters, published by Monacelli/Phaidon

A: Do you work with a designer, or are most of the ideas, yours?

C: For both Blue Violet and Emerald Drifters, I worked with the designer, Jeanette Abink. Jeanette is one of the most innovative and exciting book designers out there. While I have taught bookbinding for years, book design is its own world, its own art form. For any book I think it’s important to have a second pair of eyes, someone coming at it purely from a place of form and design. Jeanette and I work very closely together. We have meetings two or three times a week during the heart of it all. It’s a really joyful collaborative process. She is the best at her game so I trust her completely.

©Cig Harvey, Emily and the Irises, from Emerald Drifters, published by Monacelli/Phaidon

A: It’s interesting that you have focused on cakes and flowers, two elements we use to celebrate or memorialize events. Did Scout’s baking inspire the cake work?

C: Yes, Scout when she was twelve for a period of about a year, started making these wild and wonderful cakes. It was inspired by my friend Jesse. Jesse grew up in a house where every year for her birthday, her mum would make these crazy elaborate cakes that broke the form of a traditional birthday cake. These cake piles were enormous and extravagant. Scout took that and really ran with it, decorating the cake with shells and photographs, feathers, and objects. Scout would make these cakes and I would photograph them. It was wonderful working with Scout in this way, a really beautiful collaboration.

Hawthorn Blossoms & Camelias © Cig Harvey

©Cig Harvey, Hawthorn Blossoms & Camelias, from Emerald Drifters, published by Monacelli/Phaidon

A: I was so moved by your essay about your dog, Scarlett. It is a profound telling of the last moments with your daily companion and then to turn the page and see her under marigold fabric surrounded by flowers made me tear up. I love your line about missing the daily celebration that a dog gives you when you come home. Every time I see crumbs on the floor, I have the same feeling of loss.

You’ve suffered numerous losses over the recent past. I imagine that the losses make life even more precious, and the celebration of color and beauty and small gifts of wonder are so much more profound. Your book helps us remind ourselves to take it all in, so we can live an extraordinary life, not just an ordinary one.

What was your favorite part of creating the book?

C: Loss is very much a part of everyone’s life and my photographs are a call to live. Time is the most important currency, we have this one life and how can we live it most fully. For me, the highlight of making the book was thinking about and having conversations with people about how do we live more, feel more, be more present in the world. In many ways that vignette about Scarlet is one of my favorites in the book. I think it hits a lot of people who have lost an animal. We don’t deserve them. They’re too good to us.

A: Over the years, your work has become more gestural and open ended. The addition of writing fleshes out the work in a wonderful way. Did you learn something from combining the writing and the images?

C: In the 90s I started writing as a generative exercise, a way to access more photographs. I never intended to publish those words alongside the photographs, but as time went on I realized the words did something different than the photographs and that together the combination of the two added up to more than the sum of its parts. When I published my first book, You Look at Me like An Emergency in 2010, it was important that the text was alongside the photographs, even written on the photographs at that time. As the years have progressed, the writing has become just as important as the images. Each book that I have published over the last fifteen years has had more and more text and perhaps I have a novel next.

A: And finally, describe your perfect day.

C: My perfect day is an ordinary Tuesday where nothing really happens. I get up early in the quiet, in the dark, before Scout and Doug wake up. I sit, light a candle and I write something with a delicious cup of coffee with cream. That’s one of my favorite tastes. Throughout the course of this perfect Tuesday I’ll make photographs, go to yoga, walk the little dog Blue with my girlfriends, then pick Scout up from school and get her to practice. Then I’ll cook a delicious dinner, maybe roast chicken, watch one show––I’m not a gobbler––and then off to bed early with a book. That’s my perfect day. Kind of boring, isn’t it? So basically it has to hit these things on the list: I’ve done something creative, I’ve been present for my family, I’ve done something for my mind and body, and walked my dog outside with my girlfriends. If I’ve done all of those things, that’s the perfect day.