FIONA PARDINGTON

Core to Pardington’s practice is the desire to restore human, natural and spiritual equilibrium, and create serious engagement with cultural and environmental concerns by cloaking them in a seductively beautiful aesthetic sensibility. Her use of lighting is pure dramaturgy. She uses deep chiaroscuro to draw her subjects out of darkness as if they are surfacing from another world, luminous with the aura of mana.

Works range from photographs of phrenological busts made of Pacific peoples from D’Urville’s third Pacific voyage (1837-1840) from Pardington’s The Pressure of Sunlight Falling series (2011), to the familiar still life images, highly magnified pictures of butterfly scales from Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle (2017),and the delicate portraits of taxidermic bird specimens from museum collections taken in 2024.

This exhibition coincides with a major milestone: Pardington’s presentation of Taharaki Skyside as Aotearoa New Zealand’s official representative artist at the 2026 Venice Biennale. That body of work is closely related to bird photographs. Seen together, these works reaffirm her position as one of the country’s most influential photographic artists, continually expanding how photography can evolve, honouring histories while imagining new futures.