"I am like the active verb to be and to do," wrote the determined trailblazing early New Zealand painter and writer Emily Cumming Harris. "I am too necessary an appendage to be left out," she added.
Born in England in 1837 and living to age 88 in Nelson in 1925, Harris has ensured that she is now, 100 years on, being remembered.
Her remarkable botanical paintings, created with close contact with leading botanists were published and accepted into international exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Christchurch and London. A natural archivist, Harris was also, it has finally been revealed, a pioneering New Zealand poet. Of being behind the battle lines during the New Zealand Wars in the 1860s in New Plymouth she writes, "I believe I was at that time the only girl in all Taranaki who ever wrote a line."
Emily Harris wearing a plaited straw bonnet trimmed with gathered tulle, satin, lace, white flowers and decorations that look like tiny bells. Glass-plate negative, c.1898. Photo: Nelson Provincial Museum, Tyree Studio Collection, 55512
In sustained detective work undertaken thus far over nine years, working with family descendants, Harris' story and work have started to be gathered. Included are 10 poems, and almost 200 images brought together in a beautiful newly published book from Te Papa Press, Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris.
The authors are Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson.
A former New Zealand poet laureate and academic, poet Leggott assembled a team of researchers at the University of Auckland in 2016 to work on the project. They drew on Field-Dodgson's 2003 Masters thesis, which considered colonial women botanical artists.
Leggott and Field-Dodgson has itself been a distinctive partnership. As a blind person and a teacher, Leggott notes she has nurtured the skill to get others to look harder at what an artist is trying to convey. As they worked on the book, she would ask Field-Dodgson to describe the paintings in detail to her, the artist's images becoming words.
Harris' work itself sometimes features 'word-paintings' alongside her paintings and drawings. Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris, likewise, richly brings together carefully chosen words and pictures.
