I am like the active verb to be and to do," wrote the determined trailblazing early New Zealand painter and writer Emilly Cumming Harris. "I am," she added, "too necessary an appendage to be left out.'
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.
Emily's 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, Cumming Harris was also, it has finally been revealed, a pioneering New Zealand poet. Of being behind the battlelines 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."
In sustained detective work undertaken thus far over nine years, working with family descendants, Emily's 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 Michele 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.
Michele and Catherine 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 Catherine Field-Dodgson to describe the paintings in detail to her, the artist's images becoming words.
Emily Cuming Harris's work itself sometimes features 'word-paintings' alongside her paintings and drawings. Groundwork likewise richly brings together carefully chosen words and pictures.
