Blind seeing and beyond: how we approached Groundwork

The Spinoff

02-05-2025

Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson reveal how they pieced together the life of remarkable early botanical artist, Emily Cumming Harris, for their book Groundwork.
Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (who was born in England in 1837 and who died in Nelson in 1925) by Michele Leggott (poet) and Catherine Field-Dodgson (researcher), published by Te Papa Press, is about an early botanical artist almost lost from Aotearoa's history of art. It is an impressive book over 10 years in the making: Leggott and Field-Dodgson, assisted by a team of researchers, revive Cumming Harris's life and work through her letters and diaries, and have reproduced 200 of her vibrant, delicate images which make the book an extraordinary object to have and to hold.
In the following conversation, Leggott and Field-Dodgson let us in on how they approached their work and the process by which Leggott, who is blind, 'saw' the art.
Michele Leggott: It begins with a conversation: back and forth, question and answer, building a picture of the picture. How big is it? Can I touch its edges (if we are in the room with the work)? Where is the eye drawn and what does the artist want us to see first? And after that? And then?
With some basics in place we move on to colour, texture, foreground and background detail, compositional niceties and placement of signature and date (if they are there). The picture of the picture becomes richer, more and more detailed, as the questions take on a rhythm of their own.
This is close looking and close listening: comparable to the close reading that enhances appreciation of any kind of text, verbal or visual. The questions start in one place and take us somewhere else, with a better understanding of the work and with another question on the tips of our tongues.
It's also a lot of fun. The person who can't see is composing a version of the work, the person who can see is working hard to keep up with the questions and begins to ask questions of her own. Have we seen other works by the artist in the same vein? Watercolour or oil? Sketch or finished work? Where does the work in front of us fit into the wider picture of this artist's oeuvre?
Catherine goes away and drafts a description of what we have been looking at. She is the person with eyes and an extensive knowledge of Emily Harris's work over the more than 50 years of its practice. I'm the one who can't see and is curious about the artist who was also a poet, sensitive to symmetries of all kinds, an archivist who cared deeply about the preservation of her artistic and family records.
Catherine Field-Dodgson: I look at each painting carefully and think about what Emily is trying to convey. There is plenty of common ground between us for getting to know Emily's work in fascinating detail. What will the next conversation disclose that we haven't noticed before? Where will the questions take us this time?
We decide on a tour of three works: a medium-sized watercolour, a very large watercolour and a small oil. All three appear in Groundwork.
ML: Our caption gives me a basic sense of the content and size of Emily's watercolour, but there's more going on in the painting than her title suggests, which is why we have added a note identifying the akeake. In November 2022 you spent an afternoon looking at Emily's paintings with Oliver Stead, Curator of Drawings, Paintings and Prints at the Turnbull Library. There's a photo of him measuring up this painting during your visit to the library. Did you and Oliver talk about it?
CFD: We were captivated by so many of Emily's paintings that afternoon! For this one, we were interested in getting the exact dimensions, which were not then online. But I do remember being struck by the vibrant orange of the taupata berries and wondering why Emily hadn't mentioned the beautiful akeake seed capsules in her title. The dimensions ended up being really important, as well as the play of colour and implied movement in the painting. These elements helped connect the watercolour to three others that we know went to Sydney in 1879 for the International Exhibition.
ML: Is Emily painting an arrangement of specimens or are the plants depicted growing together? What kinds of orange, what kinds of green? Why put taupata and akeake together in this way? White or coloured paper? Natural surroundings or plain ground?
CFD: It is a busy arrangement of branches, presenting an Autumnal scene of shiny berries and papery seed capsules. My eyes are first drawn to the golden-orange taupata berries dotted across the surface of the watercolour, and then to the single branch of white-winged akeake seeds, which present a lovely contrast to the bright berries. The painting almost shimmers with movement, as the branches stretch upward, interspersed with striped-green leaves. There's something interesting happening with the background of this painting too. Emily paints a pale blue watercolour wash around the edges of the plants – it is not blue-coloured paper. The blue sometimes washes over the berries, leaves and white flowers. This helps give the work a real painterly quality. It obviously caught the eye of designer Kate Barraclough as well, because she selected this painting to be the cover image for Groundwork.
ML: And we were delighted with the choice when we were shown early versions of the cover design. As best we know, the painting has been reproduced only once or twice before. With the publication of Groundwork it has a new profile altogether. Eye-catching displays at Unity books in Wellington and Auckland, Page and Blackmore's in Nelson and in the Te Papa gift shop have duplicated its appeal on a wonderful scale.
ML: This (the image below) is one of Emily's exhibition-size watercolours, made after her visit to botanist Thomas Kirk in Wellington in October 1890. We know from Emily's diary that Kirk showed her pressed specimens and possibly living plants brought back from his voyage to the Subantarctic islands in January that year. She records sketching in Kirk's study and in his garden and she brought away with her detailed drawings that would become paintings of eight species of the islands' famous mega-flora. Aralia lyallii is one of the most impressive of the huge plants and Emily pictures it in landscape format, giving the plant and its flower spikes maximum impact. But does it sprawl or move gracefully across the picture surface?
CFD: Multiple leaves and flower heads spread gracefully across the surface of the painting. The foliage looks like giant geranium leaves. There is a plain white background, but the plant is not being presented as a static botanical illustration. Emily delicately layers watercolour wash over a pencil sketch and makes a really beautiful painting, creating depth by using a grey watercolour wash to denote areas of shadow.
There are a handful of these plant specimens collected on 9 January 1890 at the Snares by Thomas Kirk. They are now in the herbarium at Te Papa and they show the large size of the plant – several have their huge leaves folded in half to fit on the page. Emily would have seen these specimens and the landscape orientation of her big painting really helps capture the scale of the leaves.
ML: All good. But there is a problem with the colouring of the flowers. Emily's flowers are red-purple, which means the plant must be a Mainland variety because Kirk and his fellow-voyager Fredrick Chapman are adamant that the Subantarctic variety has pale flowers. But even Kirk and Chapman can't agree about the exact colouring of the flowers they saw: 'invariably of a dull pale-yellow hue, never lurid,' says Kirk; 'whitish-green masses of flowers,' says Chapman. Who is correct?
CFD: That's when we approached Botany Curator Heidi Meudt at Te Papa. She recently visited the Subantarctic islands and is incredibly knowledgeable about their mega-flora. Heidi essentially confirmed Kirk and Chapman's assessment of the flower colour, meaning that Emily's painting is in error. Her red-purple flowers mean they cannot be a Snares plant. It could be that Emily was shown a Mainland or Stewart Island specimen that had been incorrectly labelled, or perhaps she never saw a living plant in flower?
ML: Imagine how cross Emily would be about this. She was a stickler for botanical accuracy and would have hated the thought of her big painting showing a mistake. Worse, she repeated the colour error in an even larger oil panel of 1906 that depicts the Aralia and two other species in the diptych she entitled Flowers from the Antarctic Islands.
CFD: Perhaps Emily's celestial works will also make a leap into public consciousness now that they can be seen in Groundwork. One of my favourite Emily paintings isn't botanical in theme at all, it's a small oil painting of a double-tailed comet.
ML: What is it about the painting that grabs you?
CFD: It's blanketed in deep velvety darkness, depicting a shining double-tailed comet and a sky sprinkled with stars. I can picture Emily perched on a hillside sketching the night scene, which is rich with blue, grey, indigo and black tones. It is beautifully balanced, and the white comet blazes in the west just above the distant mountain range beyond Tasman Bay.
ML: Poet and retired librarian Iain Sharp says it's the view from his lounge window at Wakapuaka, northeast of Nelson, and therefore his favourite Emily Harris painting. Is there anything else going on?
CFD: Creeping along the top of the mountain range is a sliver of golden light. It doesn't detract from the brilliance of the comet and adds real warmth to the landscape. Emily must have painted the scene just after sunset. I also recognise stars from Tautoru Orion's Belt to the right of the comet.
ML: And so we went to the astronomers to find out more.
CFD: That was an amazing research moment! Astronomers Wayne Orchiston and Ian Cooper from the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand confirmed that the 1901 double-tailed comet was named Viscara. Then Ian Cooper calculated that Emily recorded the comet between 7–12 May 1901. Ian matched her stars from Tautoru Orion's Belt with scientific diagrams that showed the comet's appearance in the Southern Hemisphere sky at 7pm on those dates. Emily's observations of the natural world are accurate, as well as beautiful.
ML: Talking paintings is nothing new. One of the pleasures of Kim Hill's Saturday morning radio show was regular conversations with art historian and curator Mary Kisler. Fifteen minutes with one painting and two sets of eyes could put the work convincingly in front of listeners without the need for visual back-up, though that came later with the advent of website images.
Writing paintings can also produce trans-disciplinary magic. Martin Edmond's recreation of a painting by Anne and Colin McCahon that hung on the wall of his childhood bedroom opens his 2011 book Dark Night: Walking with McCahon. The book is an investigation of the artist's fugue experience in Sydney in 1984. In its opening pages historical and contemporary lenses collapse into one another to form an exquisite immersion in the worlds of wondering child and wandering adult.
Perhaps we need both words and images to arrive at the heart of the matter, any matter. And perhaps this is what the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had in mind when he wrote of his blindness: 'I made a decision. I said to myself: since I have lost the beloved world of appearances, I must create something else.'