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.

— text by Isabel de Sena