Fiona Pardington’s work investigates the history of photography and representations of the body, examining subject-photographer relations, medicine, memory, collecting practices and still life. Her deeply toned photographs are the result of specialty hand printing and demonstrate a highly refined analogue darkroom technique, translated in her more recent practice to digital media. Of Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Scottish descent, Pardington’s practice often draws upon personal history, recollections and mourning to breath new life into traditional and forgotten objects. Her work with still life formats in museum collections, which focuses on relics as diverse as taonga (Māori ancestral treasures), hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now-extinct buia bird, calls into question our contemporary relationship with a materialized past as well as the ineffable photographic image.

Pardington holds an PhD in photography from the University of Auckland and has received numerous recognitions, including the Ngai Tahu residency at Otago Polytechnic in 2006, a position as Frances Hodgkins Fellow in both 1996 and 1997, the Visa Gold Art Award 1997, and the Moet and Chandon Fellowship (France) from 1991-92. Born in 1961 in Devonport, New Zealand, Pardington lives and works in New Zealand.

Pardington participated in MOMENTUM’s 2011 exhibition A WAKE: Still Lives and Moving Images with 30 digital photographs chosen from three discreet series of works, now organized into the single moving image piece “Organic” (2010/11) for the MOMENTUM collection. By pairing seemingly random but personally charged items that once belonged to beloved family members in New Zealand, she questions the nature of human survival in relation to forgotten or altered cultural activity.

In 2014 Fiona Pardington undertook a seven week Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, working towards her participation in the exhibition FRAGMENTS OF EMPIRES (7 Nov 2014 – 1 Feb 2015).

“It works on a number of levels – once again my whakapapa/genealogy – random items that belong to beloved family members and important family members i had little contact with – like a child’s silver christening cup found by chance in a skip by my aunt when my grandmother’s house in bluff, southland was cleared after sale – it belonged to my father…silk scarves found in french flea markets, shells taken from beaches important to ngai-tahu because they are mahinga kai/traditional food gathering from the sea….seaweed, bottles dug out of the sand, hidden shells from the beach the ngai-tahu cheif tangatahara lived near. Paua shells from otakou – paua shells are important food but also the shell can be seen as a tourist cliche and is sitting in a strange NZ cultural limbo presently. Crystal wine glasses from op shops, native flowers and introduced weeds and pest plants introduced from overseas by the colonizers.

All the flowers and fruit are found on waiheke on roadsides (one of the few places wild food still exists on our waiheke) and back yards, or my back yard (very early house) or abandoned houses/fields. Op shops around NZ for much of the glassware/junk- or france, same. Many of the objects are mine personally, each with particular meanings/memories and places. I see reflections of the original cultures colonizers were a part of. There are personal simple lifeways in things such as agee jars and early penfolds wine/sherry bottles. Some of the bottles are dug up from early settlement is NZ like out on the otakou peninsula. Pipi and shells from traditional maori food collection beaches both here and otago/moeraki… weeds like hemlock, wormwood/mugwort, clover, etc etc…potions, healing, poisoning, folk remedies. I have yet to do clematis and a few more maori plants involved in rongoa. soon as rose season comes, theres early settlers roses that have gone wild to pick and photograph. eggs are from my freerange chickens. They tie you to nature, going and picking up warm eggs just laid. Also such a perfect meld off form and function is the egg. the big one is a hand made dummy egg – it was made by an old lady on wilma road who has organic goats, makes cheese etc – raku fired and blue (for my aracana hens) she gifted it to me when I gave her some of my laying hens.

Huge woodpigeons eat all the plum blossoms and the new leaves. All the weeds and such have their times to blossom, I’m watching seasons as I drive up and down to the ferry, watching individual plants of hemlock bud flower and seed. Lemons – nothing more beautiful than the morning scent of a lemon picked by our own hand from an ancient bush. They are all lumpy and have various leaf blights and so forth, but they are so real, matter of fact.

This series was made during Pardington’s Residency at Musée Quai Branly, Paris (Résidence PHOTOQUAI) in 2010, which she pursued as an extension of the work she presented at the 2010 Sydney Biennale (Ahua: A Beautiful Hesitation), for which she created a series of large-scale portraits of life-casts made of Maori and Pacific peoples during Dumont d’Urville’s voyage to the Pacific in the mid-19th century. This led her to further her research and exploration of the rich and equally controversial archives of French national collections and most notably those housed at the Musée de l’Homme, in Paris. Taken from both dead and living models, the resulting casts can be understood as early precursors to photography – a mechanism through which to achieve an allegedly exact, indexical recording of a subject. Similarly, photography – invented only about half a century after these casts were made –immediately became an instrument of ethnographic studies and thereby embodies a thoroughly problematic genealogy of its own. In this series, Pardington explores the presence of the subjects that were forever captured in the casts with the utmost degree of respect, thereby endowing the photograph with a profound sense of humanity, of which its history once robbed it. Simultaneously, she inverts the direction of the gaze: it is now not the colonized, but the coloniser’s view of the colonized that becomes thoroughly scrutinized. Largely abstaining from a straightforwardly judgmental approach, however, Pardington rather attempts to understand how or why it was so impossible for the colonizer to integrate with those who appeared so alien to them.

— Isabel de Sena

With a clear reference to the (Dutch Golden Age) still life genre in painting, this series is a bold challenge to much of contemporary photographic practice and its preference for highly Photoshopped and stylized imagery. Pardington’s still life photography has an extraordinary painterly quality and she dedicates much of her diligent attention to meticulously arranging, lighting and capturing the objects, rather than on working the digital images in the post-shooting phase, which, though she does not discard it altogether, she does limit to an absolute minimum. Like a painter, the quality of the image-surface is of utmost importance to her and from her classical training in the time that analogue photography was widely practiced, she became a highly skilled master of fine photographic hand-printing. Today, faced with the kind of plasticized papers and synthetic substrates that the industry produces, Pardington has turned to photo-prints on canvas in the last decades. Not fully satisfied, however, and unremittingly insistent on the importance of the image surface, Pardington has embarked on a complex period of research that has led her to invent a new photographic substrate and is currently setting up an industrial studio to produce it, based in Auckland. This substrate is ground-breaking in that it allows for a remarkable amount of detail on an extremely smooth surface and retains its prime condition even after rolling the canvas.

PHANTASMA: CECI N’EST PAS UN CHAMPIGNON

When I was young I spent childish good times in gumboots out in cow paddocks eeling or collecting mushrooms in buckets. The rain, fog, big bulls or the creeping fingers of mists slipping down from the fragrant native bush never dampened my enthusiasm, as mum’s mushrooms on toast beckoned at the end of each adventure

– Fiona Pardington

And all the time they could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St. John’s Wood. I have never been to St. John’s Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle. But all these things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train.

– G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

In many ways the Mushrooms: The Champignons Barla series of photographs is simply yet another arrow in Fiona Pardington’s thematic quiver of Eros and Thanatos, the Aristotelian and encyclopaedic collecting policies of the nineteenth century museums, the eighteenth century Wunderkammer cabinet of curiosities, and a pronounced Francophilia. The Musée de l’Histoire Naturelle in Nice, driven by the celebrated naturalist, Antoine Risso (1777-1845), was the first museum to open its doors in that city, in the Place Saint François (the old city square) in 1846. Jean-Baptiste Vérany (1800-1865) compiled its rich collections of birds, molluscs, minerals and fossils, but of interest to us is the private collection of plaster and wax models of fish, flowering plants, and especially fungi of the South of France by Jean-Baptiste Barla (1817-1896). Barla’s collection became part of the museum in 1863 when it moved to its own premises on the site of the current museum, donated to the City of Nice in 1896. It was here on a visit to Nice in April 2011 that Pardington discovered the mycological collection and photographed it for four fungus-filled days.

It is only natural that a culinary culture like the French would be fascinated by fungi. The playwright and satirist Molière named his most famous fictional creation Tartuffe for the old French for truffle, and even named his country estate “Perigord” for the region in France where the black truffle grows. The French invented the cultivation of mushrooms, growing them in the limestone caves at Bourré in the Loirre Valley since the reign of Louis XIV. Every regional cuisine of France uses its own locally growing fungi: truffles, champignon de Paris, channterelle, pleurote (oyster mushrooms), and cèpes (porcini). If you can eat it, the French probably have a sauce that goes with it, and consequently the French know their fungi. The Larousse Gastronomique contains extensive notes on the cooking of mushrooms, and the poisonous ones to avoid. Models like the Barla collection were originally created and circulated around the French municipalities on the typically pragmatic orders of a recently restored Napoleon III so that the public might be educated about which mushrooms were and were not safe to eat.

Among the images of Mushrooms we find a rambunctious cavalcade of names, forms and colours. Each unique specimen is made a character portrait, invested with a personality and supernatural presence as if one had stumbled upon them in some ancient primeval wood. Most of these specimens are poisonous. One of the most deadly fungi of all, though not found among these images, is the Amanita phalloides, the Death Cap or Destroying Angel discovered in 1727 by a French botanist who gave it its Latin name for its phallic appearance rudely jutting erect from the maternal earth. As the common names suggest, A. phalloides is deadly poisonous, and unfortunately resembles some edible mushrooms such as the common Puffball. The fifth century BC Athenian tragedian Euripides lost his wife and three children to a meal of this toadstool. It was used to deliberately poison the Roman Emperor Claudius in AD54 (so that Nero might don the imperial purple) and Pope Clement VII in 1534 to prevent him aligning with France (a few days after commissioning Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgement for the Sistine Chapel), and also caused the accidental death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1740.

Mushrooms and toadstools, the fruiting bodies of the fungi family, have long held a peculiar place in human culture and imagination. Some of those which appear in these works are infamous. The white-freckled blood-red cap of the Amanita muscaria or Fly Agaric is notorious for its use by the shamans of many cultures from throughout Eurasia to achieve communion with the divine other realm, though unlike the Psilocybe genus (so called “magic mushrooms” or just plain “shrooms”) they have rarely been sourced for recreational purposes outside of wedding feasts in the Lithuanian hinterland (served in vodka). Among the Turkmenic peoples of Siberia the A. muscaria was first consumed by a shaman and consumed by the rest of the tribe in the much safer form of the Shaman’s urine. A similar practice may have been observed in ancient India, giving rise to the legend of Soma described in the Rig Veda. It has been reported that the Sami sorcerers of Lapland would consume A. muscaria that had seven spots on their caps and claims that it was used by the Parachi-speaking tribes of Afghanistan, and the Ojibwa and Tlicho tribes of North America. It has even been suggested that the Viking Beserkers used A. muscaria to achieve their battle frenzy. The A. muscaria is perhaps the archetypal image of a toadstool (a English children’s argot word, as noted by literary opium addict Thomas de Quincy in his “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827), a place where toads were imagined to sit). Arising suddenly from the earth in a season when most other plants are dying, and bearing none of the green of spring foliage, it is easy to see how such an ominous growth would be associated with the magical, the underworld, and the dead – particularly given their frequently poisonous nature.

The abrupt eruption of fungi, particularly in circles, was attributed to shooting stars falling to earth, lightning strikes, mephitic terrestrial vapours, witches, fairies and evil spirits, beliefs persisting in rural parts of Europe well into the nineteenth century. A common folk belief was that dire things would befall any mortal foolhardy to step inside a fairy ring, ranging from being struck lame or blind, or losing one’s way or wits, to being abducted to serve in the realm of Faerie where time moves differently to our world. It was a common rural superstition that cows that grazed in a fairy ring would produce sour milk. The Ivory or Trooping Funnel Clitocybe geotropa is now known as Infundibulicybe geotropa (geotropa deriving from the ancient Greek for “earth turn”). Like misery, it loves company and frequently forms fairy rings – one such being reported in France as a half mile across and estimated at eight centuries old. In ancient Egypt only pharaohs were permitted to eat mushrooms, which they believed were reincarnations of the gods that travelled down from the heavens on bolts of lightning.

This is an association certainly not lost on Pardington:

I loved fairy rings and always made a point of trying to stand inside one on the slim hope of catching a glimpse of a fairy. Being an obedient child, I was informed I should never touch Amanita muscaria, that alarmingly festive creature that that pushed up boldly beneath the arms of dark nested pine trees in a park we lived nearby. Magic was afoot in mushroom season and I was not about to miss it…. I felt close to the earth at these times, endlessly fascinated by its secrets. When I lay on my stomach on the ground and looked closely at the delicate furls underneath the mushroom’s hat, I imagined glancing down to see changelings left by cruel fairies in place of children. The fact I was an avid reader from a very young age meant that I was steeped in fairytales and fairy law, my knowledge extended over Christmas holiday visits to my grandma’s, where I would read her occult Man, Myth and Magic weekly magazines, often scaring myself stiff, at the same time revelling in the power of the unseen, occult worlds and to me mushrooms were the outposts, fairy arena, villages or guard-towers of magical kingdoms and occult territories.

The Flemish painters subtly included toadstools in their depictions of Hell. It is A. muscaria which appears so liberally in picture books of tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, its hyphae baroquely populating the undergrowth of haunted forests full of witches, wolves and menacing anthropomorphic trees. In illustrations from the nineteenth century onward, and in that peculiarly tenacious Victorian genre of fairy painting, they are homes to the little folk, which in more recent times underwent metamorphosis into the more cheerful kitsch incarnation of the Smurf (Les Schtroumpfs in French-speaking countries) village and the giant toadstool (by-product of an extraterrestrial mineral) in Hergé’s L’Étoile mystérieuse (1942), an adventure of boy reporter Tintin later translated as The Shooting Star. One wonders if the Mushroom in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) on which the caterpillar sits smoking who-knows-what in his hookah, was related. Certainly Alice’s dramatic changes in size upon eating pieces of it suggest some kind of hallucination.

Old ocean, there is nothing far-fetched in the idea that you hide within your breast things  which will in the future be  useful to man.  You have already  given him the whale. You do not easily allow the greedy eyes of the natural sciences to guess the thousand secrets of your inmost organization. You are modest. Man brags incessantly of trifles. I hail you, old ocean.

— Comte de Lautreamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse), Les Chants de Maldoror (1869)

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

— Ted Hughes, “Relic”

Twice a day the tides that lave and redraft the coastline wash up a diversity of bounty:driftwood, kelp, shells, dead crabs, bones, fishing floats, perhaps a rare paper nautilus,and occasional hints of life in the deep interior depths and cool green hells, or over the blue horizon. After a big storm, more than likely there will be dead seagulls and albatrosses too, studies in greyscale. New Zealand’s long and supine coastline acts like a driftnet, gathering it all up. You never know what gifts Tangaroa will surprise you with, which is part of the magic of it all. If it floats, and falls into the Tasman, the Pacific, the freezing Southern Ocean, or perhaps further afield, hidden currents will probably wash it up on our sand or shingle for a beachcomber to find.

It is beachcombing which provided most of the objets trouvés for this suite of works by Fiona Pardington. Appropriately enough, it starts out as a Pacific phenomenon. The first appearance of the word in print is to be found in Herman Melville’s 1847 novel Omoo which described a community of feckless and outcast Europeans in the Islands who had abandoned Western culture for a life “combing” the beach for anything they could use or trade. Not for the faint of heart, Sappho warns the squeamish against poking the coastal rubble; Μὴ κίνη χέραδασ. While living in Waiheke Island, Fiona regularly explored Rock Bay and Ontetangi beaches, and later Ripiro and Bayley’s Beach, walking her canine menagerie. She, also, was looking for things to use and trade, though these transactions are of an entirely aesthetic sort. She is, as Shakespeare writes of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”