Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (Te Papa Press, 2025)
By Professor Michele Leggott FRSNZ and Ms Catherine Field-Dodgson
A beautiful new book about the little known but ferociously talented early New Zealand botanical artist Emily Harris has been published by Te Papa Press in April.
The book brings a determined, resourceful woman out of the shadows. Harris, who was born in England in 1837 and died in Nelson in 1925, battled to be noticed and to lift herself out of genteel poverty. Her artistic gifts helped establish working relationships with many of the leading New Zealand scientists of the day but although she has been examined alongside her artist peers Sarah Featon and Georgina Hetley, until this book neither her distinctive voice nor her almost 200 surviving images have been heard or seen in any quantity outside of archival or online spaces.
Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris has been a labour of love for distinguished poet Michele Leggott and researcher Catherine Field- Dodgson, who have worked together, supported by a team of researchers, to track down Harris’s work and tell her story. This work dates back to 2016. That year “I went to New Plymouth for the funeral of my 96-year-old English teacher Ida Gaskin,” says Michele Leggott. “I stopped off at Puke Ariki to examine paintings of the first Taranaki War by Edwin Harris for an essay I was writing about a soldier poet published in Taranaki newspapers in 1860. Shortly afterwards I discovered that Edwin’s daughter Emily, 23, was also writing poems behind the lines in New Plymouth in 1860. The search was on for another lost female poet from the colonial tradition.”
Catherine Field-Dodgson wrote her thesis on early New Zealand women artists and was thrilled to join Michele a few years on and to put her research skills further to the test. “One of my favourite moments relates to the 28 paintings Emily submitted to the 1879 International Exhibition in Sydney,” she says. “No one had located her paintings from this exhibition before. So we went scouting, and looked into newspapers and photographic collections at Te Papa, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Powerhouse Museum and the Mitchell Library in Sydney. This search turned up an intriguing photograph at Te Papa: in the background of an exhibit promoting joinery in indigenous wood were 16 botanical paintings. They were out of focus, but some of the shadows in the picture frames looked familiar. Te Papa staff were able to match three of Emily’s surviving paintings to the photo by making a number of animated GIFs and laying the paintings over the top of the photo.”
Leggott and Field-Dodson have packed the book with almost 200 images of Harris’s outstanding work and they hope that its publication will turn up more in private collections. The book also pays close attention to Emily Harris’s work as a poet.