Mary Macpherson
Groundwork by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson (Te Papa Press, 2025), 384pp, $60
It’s not easy being a visual artist in Aotearoa. There’s the constant hustle for opportunity and recognition, the need to eat and pay the bills—often involving day jobs—balanced against preserving space for art-making and creative growth. As this book about the art and writing of Emily Cumming Harris—one of Aotearoa’s first professional women artists—shows, things weren’t any easier in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Emily you can add being largely self-educated because her parents couldn’t afford to send her to school, having to start her working life as a lady companion, and often not having enough money to realise ambitious projects.
Emily was an early botanical artist, brought to Aotearoa as a child in 1841 when her parents emigrated from England. Most of her paintings were of indigenous plants and flowers, with small forays into other subjects. She also wrote poetry, although only ten poems, connected to book-works, remain. Groundwork makes good use of these, along with Emily’s lively letters and diary entries and a multitude of other original texts. The book, with its meticulous research and almost 200 illustrations of Emily’s artwork, shines a spotlight on her career, lifting it from the attention it has received in ‘archival or online spaces’ to a full consideration of an intensely creative woman operating when a newly colonised country was forming its identity. Although Harris had to battle against the odds to have a career as an artist, Groundwork focuses on her resilience and persistence.
The book opens with one of Emily’s many relationship-building or pitching letters, written in 1914 at the outbreak of war, to the keeper of botany at the British Museum. In it, she draws attention to her Flowers, Berries and Ferns books, her paintings and a book on mountain flora she was still trying to publish despite the impossible circumstances.
There is also a quote from one of her other letters: ‘I am like the active verb to be and to do, I am too necessary an appendage to be left out.’ Although this comment was part of a reflection on maintaining a social face while mourning her brother’s death in the Taranaki wars, Groundwork highlights the quote as a metaphor for Emily’s determination:
She is an active verb, resourceful and resilient, but her world is the world of Victorian conventions around gender, class and money. Some obstacles she will spring lightly over, others will require the gymnastics of that descent into the open trapdoor. She is too necessary an appendage to be left out.
Emily’s father, Edwin, was also an artist. Initially he needed to work as a surveyor to support his family before becoming a teacher of design, then a drawing master at a Nelson school. The book features several of his paintings, particularly landscapes, given poignancy by the events, people and era they recorded. Emily attributed her skills to him and an unknown drawing tutor in Hobart, where she lived for four years, not very happily, at the behest of her employers who had left Aotearoa after the Taranaki wars.
Her art career began in earnest when she returned to her family at 34 Nile St, Nelson, where they had moved after the wars. With her sister Frances, she set up a school to help pay the bills, and by 1873 was submitting to the Nelson Horticultural and Industrial Exhibition Fine Arts section. Her work (along with her father’s) was singled out for praise by a local reviewer:
Miss Harris has ready for exhibition a variety of water-colour paintings, of flowers and fruits in which nature has been copied with great success. One of these pieces shows the autumn tints of a collection of leaves from Church Hill, and these have been reproduced with very great success.
Her persistence and ambition saw her pitching for opportunities at international exhibitions—where New Zealand was showcasing its colonial wares—in Sydney and Melbourne, Wellington, Christchurch and London, as well as at an impressive array of fine arts and art society-type shows and family exhibitions organised to urgently help with the family finances. Sometimes she won awards, important for her ability to attract paying pupils, and was creatively stimulated by seeing other work on silk, satin and coloured paper. Reviews of the time gave some flavour of Emily’s work and how it was received. Commenting on the New Zealand Court in the Sydney exhibition, the New Zealand Mail singled out Emily as one of two women artists mentioned:
Miss Harris, of Nelson, contributes twenty-eight drawings of New Zealand wild flowers and berries. These are not only well drawn but faithfully coloured. She is deserving of more than commendation …
The reviewer went on to suggest a publication on New Zealand wild flowers, painted by Emily, might be a good idea.
Throughout the book, Groundwork stresses the balance between scientific accuracy and art in Emily’s work:
Emily Harris’s voice is compelling, as are the images she produced. Her paintings occupy a liminal space between scientific botanical illustration and art.
The book reproduces a feast of Emily’s artwork, from watercolours to oils to drawings and lithographs, as well as reproductions of her books. Her work is both precise and lush. There are easily identified indigenous plants with their flowers and berries—like the Chatham Island forget-me-nots, five finger, rātā and kawakawa, to name a small sample. The plants are recognisable but often have a sinuous delicacy that reminds me slightly of the work of Lois White. The colour is subdued but with an underlying richness, and the berries in particular burst with colour.
As Emily’s ambitions and contacts with ‘scientific gentlemen’ grew, her paintings expanded to mountain flora and subantarctic flowers. The mountain flora paintings, for a book she could never afford to publish, were montages that included delicate sketches of mountain scenes and campsites. Also impressive was her ability to successfully arrange groups of plants in one frame, such as three Turnbull Library-held watercolours: one where taupata and akeake fill the painting; another a dense composition of miro and tawa; and a third balancing a lush display of kiekie, five finger and karaka. Add Emily’s paintings of comets and children’s book illustrations, pictures by other relevant botanical artists, her father’s paintings, and photographs of family and exhibitions, and Groundwork becomes a fluid work where writing that wears its extensive research lightly combines seamlessly with frequent and gorgeous illustrations.
Emily’s poetry—unlike that of her cousin in England with a career of conventional publication—was in a ‘highly contextual and female mode of production’, meaning that like the writing of many women it has disappeared or gone ‘undetected’. With a small output remaining, it is difficult to have an overall view of her writing. But among the poems reproduced is a satirical piece on the efforts of the British militia to protect New Plymouth, and some lush works linked to her mountain flora book with quiet threads of ‘environmental and spiritual concern’. Her elegy ‘Lines Written on Visiting Glenavon During the War 1860’ takes us to a place she loved and stands for wartime losses such as the death of her brother Corbyn:
Oh! I could sit and gaze for hours,
Musing alone
Upon thy lovely blooming flowers
Dreaming that fairies in their bowers
First tinted them.
Groundwork’s writers comment that these ‘bell-like’ notes give way to the awareness that she cannot stay, then to the acknowledgement of war, where the stanzas end on telling short lines: ‘One gone forever / A mournful heart / Strife once has severed.’
The Glenavon poem was written following an excursion by a party of settlers to their property outside New Plymouth, vacated during the Taranaki wars. The people had been sheltering in New Plymouth for safety, and Emily in particular welcomed the daytrip:
It was a lovely day and only those who have been shut up for months in a town almost in a state of siege can imagine how delightful it was to breathe again the pure air of the country.
Emily’s enjoyment of an excursion in the midst of the New Zealand wars is disconcerting but understandable, and highlights that this is a book about early Pākehā settlers. Other insights include the circumstances—perhaps common among colonists—that brought the Harrises to New Zealand. Following money troubles in England, including a stay in debtors’ prison, her father Edwin took his family across the world expecting to receive an allotment of land in New Plymouth. We also get the more reluctant perspective of his wife Sarah, who gave birth then lost a daughter while sailing to her new home. Groundwork comments that ‘Edwin’s dreams of New Zealand acres were on a collision path with the Crown’s first interpretation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.’ The document signed in 1840, a year before the Harrises sailed over, ‘was already proving to be a source of mistrust and argument’. Difficult circumstances forced Edwin to work as a surveyor, helping to create maps of town allotments surrounded by suburban and rural sections that ‘were founded on defective deeds of purchase that would entangle settlers, government bodies and Te Āti Awa owners for decades to come’.
In 1924, a year before her death at age eighty-eight, Emily sold a collection of flower paintings to an Alexander Turnbull Library librarian. Johannes Andersen recommended the purchase of between fifty and sixty paintings at a higher asking price than Emily’s, and commented:
I should very much like the Department to give more than the accepted offer as Miss Harris is over eighty years of age, and as I saw when I visited her she is in the most necessitous circumstances. She sells a picture now and again, but has recently been compelled to accept the old age pension.
But it is Emily’s resourcefulness, rather than poverty, that Groundwork emphasises. A photograph of her in 1898 shows a strong face with eyes full of life and purpose. She created a family archive that ensured the Harris legacy was preserved, and enough of her pictures made their way into museums, the Turnbull Library and family collections for this comprehensive view of her work to be created.
Harris’s Te Ara – Encyclopedia of New Zealand entry says that the limiting circumstances of her life and the times meant ‘she did not develop beyond the level of a gifted illustrator’. But the devoted work of Leggott and Field-Dodgson now allows us to have a proper appreciation of Emily’s artwork, writing and career. Perhaps this is what is implied by Groundwork, the title of this exceptional book.
MARY MACPHERSON is a poet, photographer and art writer who lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Her photobook one foot on the bottom was published by Rim Books in 2026.
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