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.

“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.