Unity Books Event: Groundwork – An author talk

Part inspired creative endeavour and part determined detective work, Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris brings to light one of New Zealand’s most significant botanical artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This book was 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.

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. 

Kamahi, Weinmannia racemosa, 2019. Photo by Michael O'Neill. Te Papa (128694)