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.