So much of contemporary photography in Aotearoa New Zealand owes a debt to the pioneering work of Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe and Ngāti Kahungunu). At the time Pardington (MNZM, NZ Arts Foundation Laureate, Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) was studying at Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University, the prevailing form of photography taught was based in photojournalism and social documentary. Faced with a crippling shyness, Pardington sought out a more expressive, metaphysical, poetic and psychological mode, resulting in a truly unique voice that still astonishes and delights today.

There is always a highly personal element to Pardington’s photographs. The process of reconnecting to her Māori whakapapa led to the artist reconnecting taonga in museums with their tikanga context. Painting with light she reveals the mana and mauri of things culturally and spiritually significant to Māori, often with a particular connection to Kāi Tahu. These range from human artifacts to natural history specimens and include surprises with more oblique links to te reo and Māoritanga.

Pardington’s photographs are a celebration, but also often have a romantic melancholy to them with an element of memento mori and vanitas to them, reminding us that life is fleeting and the environment is fragile. They often possess a concern for history and an antiquarian curiosity about the scholarship of the past. Essentially, Pardington invented the “Dark Academia” aesthetic decades before it caught on with the internet. More importantly her work depends on a reparative “affect” that draws its audience in with luscious refined beauty and retains them for the political and social messages about colonisation, the environment, human relationships and mana wāhine. 

Pardington currently lives in the bush clad Hunter Hills outside of Waimate. On a visit to the South Canterbury Museum in Timaru, she was immediately attracted to the museum’s collection of taxidermically preserved birds. Pardington was moved to take a different approach than usual for her, treating each photograph almost like a human portrait, focussing on the heads, revealing the personality and charisma that are a quirk of their artificial preservation. There is a resulting interplay of a life and two artificial afterlives – the bird, its postmortem stuffing, and its existence as an image.

The result was the exhibition Te taha o terangi – the horizon, literally “the edge of the heavens”. The name refers to birds as beings of the air, messengers to the spirit world. It also alludes to Timaru’s coastal aspect as a port town looking out over the Pacific Ocean. It also makes reference to the rich birdlife in the native bush around Pardington’s South Canterbury home. Not all of the birds are native to the region, but this speaks to encyclopaedic collecting practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Two iterations of Te taha o te rangi were exhibited at Pardington’s dealer gallery Starkwhite in Auckland and Queenstown earlier in the year, but wanting this exhibition to be seem by a broad audience in a South Canterbury context the exhibition appears at the Aigantighe Art Gallery in Timaru. The show consists of eight images: a pair of huia, a bittern, an albatross, a weka, a pūkeko, a kākāpo, a tui, and another huia. What messages do they bring us from the other side? The prints sit beautifully in the Aigantighe’s large gallery space in the low light, a fitting tribute to Matariki 2024.

In an act of incredible generosity, at a time when many provincial cultural institutions are feeling the pinch of budget cuts in local and national government, Pardington and Starkwhite are donating three of the photographic prints from Te taha o te rangi to the Aigantighe’s permanent collection.

DETAILS
Fiona Pardington, "Te taha o te rangi" ("The Edge of the Heavens")

Aigantighe Art Gallery, 49 Wai – Iti Rd, Māori Hill, Timaru

14 June – 4 August

IMAGES

1. Fiona Pardington, Toroa, Southern Royal, South Canterbury Museum, 2024. Inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper. Framed: 140 x 176cm

2. Bittern, South Canterbury Museum, 2024. Inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper. Framed: 176 x 140cm