Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris
A luscious tribute to an early New Zealand botanical artist.
By Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson
Publication: April 2025
Pages: 384
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-99-107204-7
RRP: $60
Order Groundwork
Part inspired creative endeavour and part determined detective work, this long overdue book brings to light one of New Zealand’s most significant botanical artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Just as Emily Harris’s beautiful paintings occupy a liminal space between scientific botanical illustration and art, so this book occupies a shifting ground between biography and imagineered monograph. The result is often moving and always intriguing. Importantly, it restores to Aotearoa art history a figure who had almost disappeared.
Emily Harris has been examined alongside her artist peers Sarah Featon and Georgina Hetley, but 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.
Her life story is remarkable and her diaries, letters, poems and paintings constitute a fascinating legacy. In Groundwork, with its compelling text, they are lovingly brought together for the first time.
Review highlights
Kete, reviewed by David Hill. “Engaging, lucid, scrupulously researched. … This book is a triumph.”
DustyShelves, reviewed by Terry Toner. “This book is a beauty to behold and a very engaging read.”
Author interviews
More Than A Fielding, Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson interviewed by David Slack: “100 years after she died in Nelson in 1925 our book brings her back into the light. She's been in the shadows. She's coming out of the shadows. And there's probably quite a lot more to do and find and say.”
RNZ, Michele Leggott discusses her research on Emily Cumming Harris with Kim Hill back in 2023.
RNZ Culture 101 and RNZ Life, Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson interviewed by Mark Amery. “She's always been there, she is determined, I mean honestly this woman has a spine of steel when you look at what she has actually accomplished in her lifetime and she wasn't wealthy, she didn't marry, she's doing this on her own.”
The Post, Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson interviewed by Sapeer Mayron.
The Spinoff, Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson in conversation. “In the following conversation, Leggott and Field-Dodgson let us in on how they approached their work and the process by which Leggott, who is blind, 'saw' the art.”
Blog posts
About the authors
Michele Leggott is a poet and editor with a consuming interest in archives and the poetics of memory. She has published 11 collections of poetry and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007–9. Her archival work spans anthologies, critical editions and web projects that address New Zealand and Modernist American poetry. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. In 2017 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Catherine Field-Dodgson (Rongowhakaata, Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, Te Aitanga a Mahaki) is the author of a 2003 Master’s thesis that included the first detailed study of Emily Harris’s exhibiting practices. She is active in community and environmental organisations and a beginner learner of te reo Māori. She is currently researching her great-great-grandmother Keita Halbert/Wyllie/Gannon and her connections to Tūranganui-a-Kiwa.
