Throughout her career, Harvey has cycled between diverse media and themes. Her work can be loosely organized into recurrent motifs: self-portraits and portraiture, museum and archive works, ruins, and landscapes and mappings.
Self-portraits and portraiture Harvey's early figurative work explored the limits of representation, relationships between artist and public, memory, and the role or obsolescence of painting in a technological age. She often contrasted properties of painting (as labor-intensive, fallible, human, enduring) and photography (as immediate, indexical, machine-made, ephemeral, cheap). In the former, Harvey posed as a street-portraitist, offering 15-minute pencil portraits in exchange for written evaluations of the pictures; the latter was a 30-minute video of her hand drawing a portrait, projected onto a pad of paper and accompanied by the sitter's voiceover politely complaining about the likeness. Later installations of
The Nudist Museum included a postcard display and the
Nudist Museum Gift Shop, featuring portraits of kitsch objects formed out of nudes or body parts.
Metal Painting (2015) was commissioned as a companion to an historical exhibition on metalwork at the
Barnes Foundation. It consisted of 887 oil-on board,
impasto silhouette portraits of each piece of metalwork in the collection. Magnetically mounted salon-style in an interlocking, movable arrangement, they reflected the museum founder's idiosyncratic curation of functional objects alongside
Neo-Impressionist and early
modernist paintings. In her two-part
Museum of Failure (2007–8, Whitney Biennial), Harvey catalogued the fraught nature of artistic coherence and communication. For the public art commission
Repeat (2013, Bossuit Belgium), she "de-restored" a desanctified, post-WWI village church that had fallen into disrepair and disuse, removing the roof, interior pillars, and ritual furnishings and transforming it into a multi-use public square-artificial ruin; a new terrazzo floor incorporated schematic traces of the removed elements and a grey pattern evoking the shadows of the previous, ruined church after its bombardment. Based on the classical and neo-classical ruins they find worldwide—on display in
The Pillar-Builder Archive (2013), a room of 4,000 alien-classified postcards of such structures—they wildly misinterpret humanity as an egalitarian, three-sexed, aquatic species unified by the building of pillars.
Frieze's
George Pendle described the show—which included a hand-painted, life-size
Alien Souvenir Stand, a tour guide to actual DC sites, and a pillar-influenced alien space ship—as a "less bleakly dystopian than happily deranged" examination of the ubiquity of the classical in worldwide vocabularies of power and constructions of cultural memory.
Landscape and mapping works Harvey has employed landscape and mapping motifs in
New York Beautification Project, multifaceted installations and public mosaics. Harvey built a skeletal version of Turner's London gallery, hung with 34 rear-illuminated, hand-engraved mirrors mimicking the exhibition at the time of his death, which depicted a panoramic view of the shabbier, contemporary Margate. The project's installation at Turner Contemporary (2021) consisted of over 220 paintings hung in an enormous grid and placed in dialogue with works by Turner (sketches of Roman ruins and coastal views of Margate).
Frieze described its effect as "something quite mournful, like a wall of faces of missing people after a disaster." The project's installation at
Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2021) was described as an attempt to "localize existential memories," mapping a spectrum that ranged from traumatic experiences (war, racism, and ecological disaster) to more mundane losses caused by technological change or gentrification. Harvey installed a 10-by-100-foot, mouth-blown mirror wall engraved with her painting of a satellite view mapping a diagonal swath of Florida from the Gulf of Mexico through the Everglades to Miami Beach and the Atlantic Ocean; reflecting visitors, the image seems to float in response to changing light conditions, alluding to Florida's intimate and uneasy relationship with its water table. She reworked the design for
Atlantis into a 10 x 100-foot painting,
Mermaid: Two Incompatible Systems Intimately Linked (2019), that more directly contrasts the natural with the man-made landscape. The mosaics
Green Map (2019, San Francisco) and
Mathematical Star (2013, Brooklyn, Marcy Plaza) used more metaphorical strategies, inverting traditional mapping to highlight only local protected natural spaces in the former, and representing the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in a quilt pattern of diamond designs based on photographs of eighteen neighborhood landmarks selected by the local community board in the latter. ==Awards and collections==