Uncovering the life and poetry of trailblazing painter Emily Cumming Harris

Trailblazing early New Zealand painter and writer Emily Cumming Harris left her mark on the art and scientific world more than 100 years ago with dozens of botanical paintings. But researchers recently uncovered her life stories in unseen poems and diary entries.

"I am like the active verb to be and to do," Harris wrote. "I am too necessary an appendage to be left out."

The words of the natural archivist, who lived to the age of 88 in Nelson in 1925, struck a chord for award-winning poet Michele Leggott.

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Leggott also teaches poetry at the University of Auckland, where she led a team of researchers in 2016 to dig into the poems, art and stories of Harris and her family. They drew on Catherine Field-Dodgson's 2003 Masters thesis, which considered colonial women botanical artists.

"I've been floored by how much more there has been to find about her, partly because of digitisation," Field-Dodgson says. "It's just helped bring her to us in a different way, so we talk about her coming back into the light, and it really is.

"She's always been there, she is determined, I mean honestly this woman has a spine of steel when you look at what she has actually accomplished in her lifetime and she wasn't wealthy, she didn't marry, she's doing this on her own."

When Leggott found a never-before-seen poem from Harris which she had written behind the battle lines in the 1860s during the New Zealand Wars in New Plymouth, she felt it was a calling to release a book.

"I believe I was at that time the only girl in all Taranaki who ever wrote a line," Harris wrote.

"I thought this is a book," Leggott tells Culture 101. "But it can't be a book of Emily's poems because we don't have them, they've disappeared … So I switched the direction of the project to this idea of story-telling … basically the story of a family across the 19th Century and into the 20th [Century], who'd kept remarkable archival records."

With the help of Harris' descendants, co-authors Field-Dodgson and Leggott have written Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris – a Te Papa Press book bringing together about 200 images and 10 poems.

Leggott describes it as originally being a story of "colonial ruin". The Harris family couldn't afford to travel back to their England hometown after moving here in 1841, she says. "Awful things happened. If there was a fire, it was their house."

Further throwing them in financial dire was the loss of the only son in the family among seven girls, she says. But it was through living in bushes that Harris and her sisters became familiar with the flora and eventually led to her artistic documentations.

"They're plants that mainland New Zealanders wouldn’t have seen before, so they would've been phenomenal – we love looking at them, but they would've been really neat looking back in the early 1900s as well," Field-Dodgson says.

Harris' paintings at the Alexander Turnbull Library were often missing context, but the researchers were able to find the missing pieces of the puzzle to better understand why the artist suddenly started creating A1-sized paintings depicting mega-flora of the Subantarctic islands.

"They're quite alien-looking plants. I describe them to Michele, 'looks like a cabbage that's been folded inside out' or 'looks like a carrot or celery that's gone to seed'."

Field-Dodgson and Leggott 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's work itself sometimes features 'word-paintings' alongside her paintings and drawings.

"Word painting has always been something I've been intrigued by," Leggott says. "Catherine will know the moment I start asking a question and she gives an answer, there are three more questions after that."