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.
Emily Cumming Harris at the Turnbull Library
Join Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson, authors of Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (2025), as they explore the life and work of one of Aotearoa’s foremost botanical artists.
When | Āhea
Tue 3 Feb 2026, 5.30 to 7pm
Where | Ki hea
Taiwhanga Kauhau — Auditorium, (lower ground) National Library Wellington.
Cost | Te utu
Free event
Emily Harris was a talented botanical artist and one of New Zealand’s earliest professional women painters. Over more than 50 years, Emily produced an extraordinary body of work — hundreds of paintings and sketches exhibited in New Zealand and overseas, along with published books including New Zealand Flowers, New Zealand Ferns, and New Zealand Berries (1890).
I am like the active verb to be and to do, I am too necessary an appendage to be left out.
— Emily Harris, age 23, to her mother in 1860
A century after her death in Nelson in 1925, Emily Harris’s clear voice and exquisite paintings are finally reappearing from the shadows.
Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson are the authors of Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (Te Papa Press, 2025). In their research for the book, they discovered the intersecting trails of an archival puzzle, as yet unsolved, that brings Emily Harris and her mentor, the eminent botanist Thomas Kirk, into astounding visual alignment at the Alexander Turnbull Library.
Emily Cumming Harris, Rangiora (Brachyglottis rangiora), 1887, watercolour, 730 x 520mm. Reproduced as a Turnbull Library print in 1968. Alexander Turnbull Library, C-024-007
