It is a commonplace that art and writing by women has gone undetected and underestimated, that ‘female speck in the history of texts’ written about so eloquently by American poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Like DuPlessis, we start with what can be found. We link fragments of story and picture to produce a viable narrative and find, to our delight, that narrative fragments make good groundwork. With the evidence to hand and a desire for nosing out more, it is possible to construct a life and times for Emily Harris, who lived between 1837 and 1925, and whose work is still relevant today.
Our presentation will track Emily Harris’s archival traces and the huge ambition they point to. A diary entry from 1886; one of her mother Sarah’s barely legible letters from Taranaki; a wall full of gilt-framed watercolours coming into focus at the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879; and a photograph of not one but two very large oil panels at the Christchurch International Exhibition of 1906. Emily Harris knew about all of this and more (‘she is the scout of its presence’) but finding it again and piecing it together has taxed archival and imaging resources on both sides of the Tasman. In 2024 a different Emily Harris steps from the shadows: the artist of exquisitely rendered indigenous flora augmented by the contexts that can now be put around her work.
And then there is the file of vanished poems, some of them as early as 1860. ‘I am like the active verb to be and to do, she told her mother presciently. ‘I am too necessary an appendage to be left out.’