Emily Cumming Harris at the Turnbull Library — Part of Friends of the Turnbull Public Programme 2026
Schedule
Tue Feb 03 2026 at 07:30 am to 09:00 am
UTC+13:00Location
Corner Molesworth and Aitken Streets, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand 6011 | Wellington, WG
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Join Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson, authors of “Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris” (2025), as they explore the life and work of one of Aotearoa’s foremost botanical artists.Join us at the Library or online. Register for a link to join on Zoom: https://dia-nz.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2kjmc1tXQQGbnCVEFV9gIw#/registration
The art and writing of Emily Cumming Harris
Emily Harris was a talented botanical artist and one of New Zealand’s earliest professional women painters. Over more than 50 years, Emily produced an extraordinary body of work — hundreds of paintings and sketches exhibited in New Zealand and overseas, along with published books including New Zealand Flowers, New Zealand Ferns, and New Zealand Berries (1890).
"I am like the active verb to be and to do, I am too necessary an appendage to be left out." — Emily Harris, age 23, to her mother in 1860
Finding Emily Harris at the Turnbull Library
A century after her death in Nelson in 1925, Emily Harris’s clear voice and exquisite paintings are finally reappearing from the shadows.
Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson are the authors of Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (Te Papa Press, 2025). In their research for the book, they discovered the intersecting trails of an archival puzzle, as yet unsolved, that brings Emily Harris and her mentor, the eminent botanist Thomas Kirk, into astounding visual alignment at the Alexander Turnbull Library.
The Library’s collection includes 63 of Emily’s botanical watercolours, a hand-coloured set of Emily’s lithograph books that once belonged to Alexander Turnbull, and her unpublished manuscript, New Zealand Mountain Flora, that was purchased by the Library in 1970.
A Friends of the Turnbull Library event
The Friends of the Turnbull Library, Ngā Hoa o te Whare Pukapuka Turnbull, offers a monthly programme of free public talks. These talks are held in the National Library in Wellington and on Zoom. Some of these talks will be repeated in Auckland. The public programme highlights the work of researchers who draw on Turnbull material for their projects and staff who care for and research the collections.
About the speakers
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 from 2007 to 2009. 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, Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, 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 Māori. She is currently researching her great-great-grandmother Keita Halbert/Wyllie/Gannon and her connections to Tūranganui.
Image: Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson in Nelson, August 2025. Photo by Jo Dippie.
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Where is it happening?
Corner Molesworth and Aitken Streets, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand 6011, New ZealandEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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