Book

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

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.

Publication: April 2025
Pages: 384
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-99-107204-7

RRP: $60

Order Groundwork from the Te Papa store here, or through your local independent bookshop via Bookhub here.

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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.”
  • New Zealand Arts Review, reviewed by John Daly-Peoples. “… she has not been well served by history but this book will do much to correct that.”

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 Federico Magrin.
  • Sunday Star Times, Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson interviewed by Sapeer Mayron. “She’s there in these key moments in Aotearoa New Zealand’s history, her work documents its movement through time and empire-building, and she’s there, but she hasn’t been written about in that way.”
  • 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.”
  • bFM, Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson interviewed by Sofia Roger Williams. They talk about what inspired them to embark on their research.

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