Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris

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.