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.
Notice first the cake server: a plain steel triangle, its handle running off into the dark like a tool left mid-task, lifting a wedge of cake as if to offer it across the table. That single prop is the whole argument of the picture. Cig Harvey stages her still lifes as small theatres, and here the genre of the dessert plate is dismantled and rebuilt — the slice has gone translucent, a frosted prism of pale glass through which a morpho-blue butterfly wing burns at the centre, veined and cerulean, sealed where the filling should be.
The construction is deliberate and you are meant to read it as construction. Velvet, that studio shorthand for preciousness and the vitrine, floods the frame in inky blue-green, swallowing every edge so the cake becomes the sole source of light, lit from within rather than upon. Harvey works in the lineage of the contemporary tableau, where the photograph is built rather than found, and the object is staged to behave like a relic. The kitchen tool and the trapped wing collide two registers — the domestic and the specimen case, sweetness and entomology — and hold them in a single, unhurried exposure.
What positions this within her practice is exactly that refusal of the documentary. Harvey, whose work is held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and published in monographs such as *Blue Violet*, builds saturated colour and synaesthetic strangeness into otherwise ordinary materials. The blue here is not described; it is composed, a chord struck once and let ring against the surrounding black.
Notice first the cake server: a plain steel triangle, its handle running off into the dark like a tool left mid-task, lifting a wedge of cake as if to offer it across the table. That single prop is the whole argument of the picture. Cig Harvey stages her still lifes as small theatres, and here the genre of the dessert plate is dismantled and rebuilt — the slice has gone translucent, a frosted prism of pale glass through which a morpho-blue butterfly wing burns at the centre, veined and cerulean, sealed where the filling should be.
The construction is deliberate and you are meant to read it as construction. Velvet, that studio shorthand for preciousness and the vitrine, floods the frame in inky blue-green, swallowing every edge so the cake becomes the sole source of light, lit from within rather than upon. Harvey works in the lineage of the contemporary tableau, where the photograph is built rather than found, and the object is staged to behave like a relic. The kitchen tool and the trapped wing collide two registers — the domestic and the specimen case, sweetness and entomology — and hold them in a single, unhurried exposure.
What positions this within her practice is exactly that refusal of the documentary. Harvey, whose work is held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and published in monographs such as *Blue Violet*, builds saturated colour and synaesthetic strangeness into otherwise ordinary materials. The blue here is not described; it is composed, a chord struck once and let ring against the surrounding black.