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Groundwork
The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris
Brief Description
A luscious tribute to an early New Zealand botanical artist, Groundwork is 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...
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See moreJust 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.
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Description
A luscious tribute to an early New Zealand botanical artist, Groundwork is 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 now, 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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781991072047
Publisher: Te Papa Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 10 April 2025
Country: New Zealand
Imprint: Te Papa Press
Illustration: Fully illustrated throughout
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 200.0mm
Height: 230.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 384
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Arts & Culture
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Biography & Memoir
Catherine Field-Dodgson
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Michele Leggott
New Zealand and Australia Published
New Zealand Biographies
New Zealand Non-Fiction
New Zealand Published
Non-Fiction
The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2026
About the Author
Michele Leggott is a poet and editor with a consuming interest in archives and the poetics of memory. She has published 11 collections of poetry and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007-9. Her archival work spans anthologies, critical editions and web projects that address New Zealand and Modernist American poetry. She received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. In 2017 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Catherine Field-Dodgson (Rongowhakaata, Ngai Tamanuhiri, Te Aitanga a Mahaki) is the author of a 2003 Master's thesis that included the first detailed study of Emily Harris's exhibiting practices. She is active in community and environmental organisations and a beginner learner of te reo Maori. She is currently researching her great-great-grandmother Keita Halbert/Wyllie/Gannon and her connections to Turanganui-a-Kiwa.
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