Our Reading Group takes place on the third and fourth Thursday of the month. Te Papa Press, Thursday 22 May:
Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris By Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson
We will be joined by co-author Catherine Field-Dodgson for Q & A. She’ll also bring along copies of Emily’s hand-coloured flowers, berries and ferns to show.
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.
Copies of the books will be for sale at the Reading Group, with a generous discount available to attendees on the day.
Free entry. Koha will be collected at the meeting. All proceeds go towards the purchase of acid free envelopes for document storage.
Please register for this group by booking your free ticket. We will meet by the blue couches by the display of the Treaty of Waitangi on level 4 at 1.50pm.