The Ten-Question Q&A with the authors of Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris

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. 

Q1: When did you each become aware of Emily Harris?

Michele Leggott: In the summer of 2016 when I went to New Plymouth for the funeral of my 96-year-old English teacher Ida Gaskin. Mark and 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, and the search was on for another lost female poet from the colonial tradition. I don’t think Ida Gaskin would have begrudged me the detour to the museum on the day of her funeral.

Catherine Field-Dodgson: I became interested in botanical art when I was studying at Victoria University in the late 1990s. I was delighted to discover a number of colonial women artists in New Zealand who painted botanical artworks, including Emily Cumming Harris. I came across the typescript of her diaries at the Alexander Turnbull Library and her letters at Te Papa. Emily really stood out to me because of her strong and lively voice, as well as her beautiful paintings.

Q2: How did it happen that you decided that Emily really deserved your close attention and began to work together?

ML: In my final years working for the University of Auckland I had brilliant research support from no fewer than seven postgraduate students, each of whom became as intrigued as I was by Emily’s art and writing. We uploaded the results of our early discoveries to the research website Emily Cumming Harris in New Zealand and Australia, hoping to attract more information about Emily’s family, her vibrant letters and diaries and the beautiful watercolours she went on to paint after leaving Taranaki for good in 1861. Catherine found the website and was an early responder to our blogposts. She was a natural addition to what we had come to call Team Emily, a relay of researchers building on the composite picture we were assembling of Emily and her story.

CFD: After I finished my Master’s thesis, I worked in communications. I came across the Emily Harris project on social media and messaged the team to say how impressed I was with their research, and then slowly became absorbed into Team Emily! My interest in Emily was rekindled after seeing how much more information about her was available to research, especially online, and also knowing that the Harris family descendants were helping with the project – they’ve shared their family archives and artworks with us and have been such an important part of the book.

Q3: It has clearly been a dynamic and creative partnership. How did you approach the research and how did you decide to allocate the tasks?

ML: Perhaps organic would be the word to use here. We rapidly figured out that we had complementary skills when it came to research and writing. Team Emily had been consulting Catherine’s indispensable MA thesis almost from the start. We were so pleased when she agreed to contribute her art history expertise to the project. As I had done with my postgrad researchers, I would ask Catherine to describe Emily’s paintings as if she were scripting for radio. As a blind person and a teacher, I have nurtured this skill in my students and researchers. It makes you look harder at visual detail and what the artist is trying to convey. A first description leads to another question and then to a refinement or an addition. It’s an excellent way of tracking the process that takes place between artist and viewer, any viewer who cares to look closely.

CFD: I agree, it was fairly organic. We both enjoy diving into archives and are highly tuned to the material – often a ‘hunch’ would yield really great results. As well as having regular conversations with Michele, I read through material that the other researchers had compiled. I’d then identify gaps and go searching to see if I could find anything else.

Michele also has an incredible memory, especially for names. I’d research people and events, often many months apart, and Michele would say ‘that name sounds familiar’, and she’d connect the dots. One example is when I was looking into women who exhibited in the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. I came across Wellington-based Fanny Richardson, who exhibited paintings of New Zealand flowers on terracotta. About four months later, when we were researching subantarctic voyages and plants, Michele realised that it was the same Fanny Richardson who travelled to the subantarctic islands in 1890 with her sisters on board the Hinemoa, and who later became a well-known botanical artist in her own right.

Q4: There must have been some real a-ha! and breakthrough moments along the way. Can you tell us about a couple?

ML: I’ll describe one of the most profound textual moments of the project. It occurred right after the trip to Puke Ariki in 2016, when I first encountered Emily’s writing in some of the family material that has been in the museum’s collection for decades. I was listening to a transcription of Emily writing about the Taranaki war and her visit in late 1860 to the ruined farm at Glenavon on the north bank of the Waiwhakaiho River. She describes going into the overgrown dell near the farmhouse and how her soldier escort, the handsome Captain Miller, told her she should write a poem about the place. She wonders how he knew she was a poet (‘I believe I was at that time the only girl in all Taranaki who ever wrote a line’) and then tells us she did write a poem later that day but didn’t show it to Miller. Then – this is the moment I nearly leapt out of my skin – she writes out the poem for us. It’s a very good poem, and for me it was a signal that a big search was needed to find out more. So Ida Gaskin, who first put my feet on the poetry road at New Plymouth Girls’ High School, had an eye on the future even as she was leaving us to sort out what she was fond of calling our immortal souls.

CFD: One of my favourite moments relates to the twenty-eight paintings that Emily submitted to the 1879 International Exhibition in Sydney. No one had ever located her paintings from this exhibition before. So we went scouting, and looked into newspapers and photographic collections at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, 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 there are sixteen botanical paintings. The paintings themselves are out of focus, but some of the shadows in the picture frames looked familiar. With the help of Rebecca Rice and Yoan Jolly at Te Papa, we have been able to match three of Emily’s surviving paintings to the photo. Yoan made a number of animated GIFs, laying paintings overtop the photo, and they are incredibly satisfying to look at. These paintings tell a compelling visual story when they are reunited. They belong to different collections around the country, so it’s been fantastic to bring them together digitally.

Q5: The number of works you’ve managed to find is extraordinary. But, as the book makes clear, there are also so many lost works. Are you hopeful that one day these will be located?

ML: Like the website before it, Groundwork will function as a large fishing net that we are hoping will bring more works by Emily to the surface. They aren’t so much

lost as invisible: perhaps hanging on walls or stored in cupboards outside the range of public collections. As Emily makes her re-appearance 100 years after her death in Nelson in 1925, it would be great to think that more of her work will be re-discovered. Someone can then begin the serious job of making a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and drawings. And someone else can put together a comprehensive bibliography of her writing and the research it has inspired. And someone else again can organise the first exhibition of her works since they were last on view in Nelson in the 1910s and 1920s.

CFD: There are definitely more paintings and books out there that we don’t know about. I’d love to see Emily’s 1906 Liliaceae oil painting reappear – it was sold in a Wellington auction in 2002 and must be hanging on someone’s wall. I’m hopeful that some of her paintings of yellow rātā might be in someone’s private collection, too. And we’ve searched and searched but have never found a photo of Emily’s art studio. Emily was so good at promoting her work and there’s a good chance that a photo of her studio filled with paintings exists somewhere.

Q6: Favourite botanical drawing, and why?

ML: I admire Emily’s use of word-painting in the caption for her rendition of tītoki, one of twelve drawings that were made into lithographs for her book New Zealand Berries. Drawing and lithograph are uncoloured but by adding two and a bit lines from Alfred Domett’s epic poem Ranolf and Amohia, Emily saturates the mind’s eye with colour long before she started hand-painting copies of her 1890 book. Here is her caption in full:

Electryon excelsum
(Titoki)

A lofty tree common in the forest of the North and South Islands. The only species of the genus and confined to New Zealand. Berries bright scarlet with one black shining seed.

‘Nor yet Had the Electryon’s beads of jet, Each on its scarlet strawberry set.’
Domett.

CFD: I like the way Emily rendered berries, often as shiny little orbs. The first time I saw her watercolour sketch of mahoe (Melicytus ramiflorus, mahoe, or hinahina) in the Alexander Turnbull Library, I was really taken with the clusters of little purple berries – beautiful pops of colour against the light grey background. It is a simple watercolour and wash sketch, but really striking. We included it as the first image in the book.

Q7: Favourite painting, and why?

ML: One of the paintings that stays with me is the big oil of mānuka and pōhutukawa, now in the collection of Emily’s great-great-niece Annabel Galpin. It has been in the family since it was painted in 1906, one of twelve oils Emily made for exhibition in Christchurch that year. In the foreground is an arrangement of cut stems from both plants in flower, the white and the red against a landscape background that falls away to the sea, full-grown trees in the mid-ground and half a dozen seabirds wheeling overhead in a pale sky. In my mind the painting shimmers between its background landscape, most likely some part of the Nelson coast Emily knew well, and the luxuriant colouring of the summertime flowers. I hesitate to say it’s a Christmas painting but the implication is there. Only the painter can really know exactly where and when scene and plants were brought together. To help me think about the painting (and using one of Catherine’s detailed descriptions), I wrote a poem called ‘White-flowering mānuka and pōhutukawa’. It begins:

she wakes and memory paints the scene
appearing before her flying to and through the gap
top left where headland and bay and wheeling birds
locate us exactly and there is no holding
particulars that rush against the light against
spectral decoupage the day we were there

a branch reaches upwards almost to top centre

there will be twelve and they will go
out in the world each with a wooden bowl
and saffron robes mendicants of apparent magnitude
looking for dream openings those gaps
between worlds where two people make love
the condition of their continuing existence

CFD: Emily’s little double-tailed comet painting, which she painted in 1901. It’s in the collection at Nelson Provincial Museum. I love the velvety darkness of it, and how the comet is a beautiful streak of white in the sky. Emily has also painted stars and constellations, and it was a fantastic moment for us when local astronomers were able to confirm the date of the comet, and almost the exact day that Emily painted it, because of her placement of the stars in Tautoru Orion’s Belt.

Q8: Favourite poem, and why?

ML: The first one that came to light: ‘Lines Written on Visiting Glenavon during the War 1860’, which is also a veiled elegy for Emily’s brother Corbyn, who was killed in ambush on the beach at Waitara three months previously. Here are the lines that move me most:

But now my stay so short so brief
I may not pause,
To linger o’er one bud or leaf
Or twine one fair or fragrant wreath
With thy sweet flowers.

One rapid glance around me cast
Noting the trace
Of River’s step I onward passed
With painful thought that ’twere the last
For years perchance.

Though we have searched high and low, just ten of Emily’s poems have re-emerged. We know she was writing them as late as the 1880s and 1890s but they have disappeared. Perhaps one day someone will find a folder or open a box and there they will be. Emily was unmarried, but two of her six sisters married and lived in New Plymouth. Their descendants, now widely dispersed, still hold family papers and paintings and have been extremely generous in their support of our project. It is just possible that the poems have wandered to a part of the family we have not been able to locate, or that another search of family archives will produce something that has been overlooked. We have completed the groundwork (one of the reasons for the book’s title), but there is always more to be done.

CFD: My favourite poem of Emily’s is ‘Come cast all gloomy cares away’. This poem is a strong female voice in the Taranaki war and it is scathing and satirical. When I read it, I hear it dripping with sarcasm: ‘Behold the conquering hero comes / Another such a victory won’. Like many of the settlers in Taranaki, Emily is disenchanted with the imperial troops, and it’s that powerful voice of hers coming through again: she was there, she’s not happy and she’s recording her experience.

Q9: What six words would you each use to describe Emily?

ML: Ambitious, persistent, perfectionist; plucky, generous, loyal.

CFD: Determined, passionate, skilful, clever, trailblazer, connected.

Q10: Why is her story important?

ML: She is a born archivist, a remembrancer, a woman looking back while moving forward. We owe her a long-delayed consideration of her place in the colonial and early twentieth century traditions of creative female endeavour in Aotearoa New Zealand.

CFD: In Emily’s own words: ‘I am like the active verb to be and to do. I am too necessary an appendage to be left out.’ Her voice is strong and unique. She is one of Aotearoa’s first professional women artists, and she changed and adapted her painting style throughout her career. Emily has always been there, but it is only now that we’re able to bring her into the light again.