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.
Beneath the highest twigs, if I look closely, small drops of rain hang unfallen, each one carrying the day’s gray light in miniature. I had come for the berries, naturally; the drops changed everything. They tell me the shower has only just ended, that this red was rinsed moments before I arrived, that the whole thicket is cold to the touch. A detail the size of a pinhead re-reads the scene: not festivity but aftermath.
And what a scene: hundreds of winterberries burning against a wood gone black, dry grasses the color of old rope tangled below, one pale birch keeping its distance like a witness. The nearest branches drift out of focus, so the foreground reds swell into soft globes, the way lights do when one’s eyes are wet. Red repeated once is a signal; repeated a thousand times it becomes a climate. I find I cannot count them, and counting is beside the point: the bush offers its extravagance in the season that owns nothing else.
Cig Harvey photographed this in Camden, close to her home in Rockport, Maine, and it belongs to her long argument that the domestic and the botanical can carry feeling at full strength, an argument advanced in The Blue Notebook, You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and in American museum collections. The archival pigment print sustains what the eye first refuses to believe, that red at that pitch against that dark. I return to the one drop still holding. It has not fallen yet; in this print, it never will.
Beneath the highest twigs, if I look closely, small drops of rain hang unfallen, each one carrying the day’s gray light in miniature. I had come for the berries, naturally; the drops changed everything. They tell me the shower has only just ended, that this red was rinsed moments before I arrived, that the whole thicket is cold to the touch. A detail the size of a pinhead re-reads the scene: not festivity but aftermath.
And what a scene: hundreds of winterberries burning against a wood gone black, dry grasses the color of old rope tangled below, one pale birch keeping its distance like a witness. The nearest branches drift out of focus, so the foreground reds swell into soft globes, the way lights do when one’s eyes are wet. Red repeated once is a signal; repeated a thousand times it becomes a climate. I find I cannot count them, and counting is beside the point: the bush offers its extravagance in the season that owns nothing else.
Cig Harvey photographed this in Camden, close to her home in Rockport, Maine, and it belongs to her long argument that the domestic and the botanical can carry feeling at full strength, an argument advanced in The Blue Notebook, You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and in American museum collections. The archival pigment print sustains what the eye first refuses to believe, that red at that pitch against that dark. I return to the one drop still holding. It has not fallen yet; in this print, it never will.