Groundwork The Art And Writing Of Emily Cumming Harris

Description

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. 

Table of contents

Contents: Finding Emily: a prologue 9
01. The fine girl 23
02. Mapping and painting 37
03. Aunt Emma 55
04. The lighted windows 71
05. The active verb 89
06. Holbrook Place 105
07. 34 Nile Street 119
08. The missing work 143
09. Flowers, Berries and Ferns 161
10. The family exhibitions 189
11. Mountain Flora 203
12. Subantarctic flowers 219
13. Scientific gentlemen 251
14. The mega-paintings of 1906 275
15. Caves, eclipses and comets 291
16. Moores and Weyergangs 315
Scouting: an epilogue 333
Emily Harris exhibitions 348
Text references 350
Bibliography 366
Acknowledgements 373
About the authors 377
Index 378

 

Author Biography:
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, Ngai Tamanuhiri, 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 Maori. She is currently researching her great-great-grandmother Keita Halbert/Wyllie/Gannon and her connections to Turanganui-a-Kiwa.