Venice Biennale: NZ Photographer Fiona Pardington’s Taharaki Skyside Brings Dead Birds To Life
Birds are messengers between mortal and spiritual worlds - but don’t ask photographer Fiona Pardington to tell you what, exactly, they are saying.
There is a lot of crying, says Fiona Pardington.
“Somebody opens the drawer and you just see all of the dead and extinct birds ...”
She tries not to read too many books about this loss. All the species humans have consigned to museum storerooms. All the stories of the last huia, whēkau, insert-native-bird-here.
“It’s just too painful and traumatic. I find it really, really hurts. But then I go, ‘Okay, let’s reframe this’.”
Take the artist literally.
In May, Dr Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht) will represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale – one of the world’s most prestigious and long-running international art exhibitions.
Taharaki Skyside comprises 17 enormous photographs of taxidermied manu (birds). Their eyes reflect the historic land and seascapes they might have lived in; the photograph’s frames draw on the shared colours Pardington observed in the skies in her home near Waimate and the sunrises and sunsets of Venice.
The exhibition is an evolution of Te taha o te rangi, first shown at Timaru’s Aigantighe Gallery, and conceived after Pardington saw South Canterbury Museum’s collection of taxidermy native birds.
Writes her friend and art historian Andrew Paul Wood: “Her photographs give them a second life, or perhaps an afterlife ...” In a video interview, he tells her the birds have a gravity that “pulls you out of your orbit”.
The birds are dead, but Pardington has brought them to life. Their gaze is sharp-stern-sombre and quick. I feel like they are judging me.
“I mean, they’re not,” says Pardington. “But, yeah, they are, because that’s your conversation with them.”
And then, because Pardington is possibly the least arts-speaky artist you can imagine: “Birds are messengers so they have got something to say to you, but I don’t know what that is. That’s up to you two. Go get a room!”
It’s after lunch on a Wednesday. I’m in Auckland and she is in South Canterbury. Halfway through the interview, she explains the breathy grunt that is happening off camera – her dog Minerva is snoring on her lap. She sends pictures of Persephone the toe-biting kitten and fondly recalls Frou Frou her little Polish bantam who used to lay an egg a day (but never pooed) on the bed.
Lest you think she’s sentimental, last night Pardington shot two wallabies. Bang. Bang. Stone cold actual dead.
“It’s an infestation. We’re at ground zero in the Hunter Hills where I live. They’re just everywhere. On the driveway, all around the paddocks, peek-a-boo. At night, they’re just about bouncing around the house. I just open the lounge door and shoot them off the balcony.”
Wallabies are an introduced pest. She would have dispatched more, but “I wasn’t fully committed to spending a lot of time out there. I had a lot of things to do”.
Make art and save the world?
“I can’t change the past but I can influence how people understand themselves in relation to taonga, to nature – the integrity of other living creatures and their rights – we’ve got a river that now is a person and birds are the same.”
She traces her interest in taxidermy birds back to a 2004 exhibition for Christchurch’s public art project Scape. Letters written by children from the Deans family – some of Canterbury’s earliest European settlers – described heading out to kill birds. She wondered: What species might have been in Riccarton Bush back then? She found them in a museum storeroom.
“The only time I’d seen a huia when I was little was in the sixpence coming out of my Great Aunt Nellie’s Christmas pudding,” says Pardington.
“What’s this bird? What’s a huia? But now everybody knows, and that’s the way it should be. We need to shoulder our responsibilities and those burdens of extinction. Photography is a really profound way of witnessing things.”
(Witness Slow Burn, opening at Te Papa on February 28 – a major survey exhibition of six decades of photography by 50 women and non-binary artists. Pardington has three 1987 works in the show that curator Lissa Mitchell describes as “big, small, loud, angry, beautiful, contemplative, reflective, uncertain, and diverse – just like the artists behind them”.)
Pardington’s exhibition and collection credits, awards and accolades, both here and internationally, would take this story’s entire word count. The artist would rather namecheck everyone else.
“I love other people’s creativity. You don’t get ahead by stepping on people’s heads and shoulders to lift yourself up. You know that cliche that the tide raises all ships? There’s not enough of that in the art world. People are too fearful, so they’re not generous. They feel that they have to take something from you in order to get ahead. In fact, you can all rise. I want everybody to know who’s with me on this journey.”
The full credits are in the book of the exhibition. And the book is a credit to its designer and the Venice project’s creative director – Pardington’s brother and artist, Neil (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht).
“My superpower is my younger brother. Every year, for 21 days, we’re the same age. And it’s been very exciting for me to be able to work with him ... he’s just got a whole set of skills that I didn’t inherit.
“I can’t add up. I can’t draw a straight line. I can’t remember. I’ve got very minimal technical skills in Photoshop. I just don’t remember systems ...”
Pardington, 64, had not yet started primary school when she decided to become an artist. In 1984, she graduated from Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts. She knew “in my bones” that photography was for her.
“And I knew that we were considered to be the people that couldn’t paint and weren’t the real artists ... it’s like the metaphor of Ginger Rogers. She did everything that Fred Astaire did, except backwards in high heels. And you’re a woman on top of that. I had nothing to lose. I was from a working-class background, we lived in Whangaparāoa, in Big Manly close to the beach, and it didn’t look like it does now.
“It was easy to commit myself because that’s what I’ve wanted since I was four. That was always my dream. That was my polestar; that’s where I headed for.
“I might be nerdy. I might have pimples. I might have glasses, but I’m gonna be an artist. That just made everything okay. It was just a really safe place and it continues to be that. It’s just a wonderland.”
Pardington’s story is complicated. It has emerged, over the years, in the media interviews that accompany her artistic ascent. The discovery, aged 10, she had been born Fiona Cameron and her father was her stepfather. The sudden death of a partner in 1993. Raising two young children on her own. A fall that led to a brain injury. In hospital, her heart stopped and she was twice brought back to life; today, she sees double without glasses.
She was the first New Zealand artist to become a French Knight (Chevalier) in the Order of Arts and Letters. She is an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to photography. In 2021, her work set a new auction record for a New Zealand photograph when Art + Object sold Davis Kea Wings (Above) for $130,425.
“I think the only time I’ve ever been super relaxed is when I come out of an anaesthetic,” she says. “You’re just going ‘wow, is this what it’s like for people whose brains don’t work too fast and they’re just in the moment?’”
But there are only, she deadpans, so many operations you can have. Add a later life diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder to Pardington’s story.
“It’s been easy for me to kind of hyper focus, to put in 18-hour plus days for decades and to think, eat, breathe and sleep it ... all of that strange energy that I have, the way the world comes to me through the kind of brain that ADHD people have, allows me to just sit on the bucking bronco for longer. Going down those deep rabbit holes – I’ve managed to make it for me, not against me.”
She describes her condition as “masked”, diagnosed by a psychiatrist, after her longtime GP suggested it as a possibility.
“I might not look like I’m bouncing off the walls but I am, quietly, inside me ... I just thought, well, that explains a lot. And then my mother piped up and said, ‘well, that explains why you never slept. You used to catnap for half an hour and that would be it. You’d be out climbing the roof’.”
Surprise. Relief. Business as usual.
“When I was lecturing, the neurodivergent people were the most interesting. That’s just 101.”
In Pardington’s world, there is no separation between the here and the hereafter. Her birds are messengers between the mortal and spiritual worlds. It does not feel grim to ask what might be reflected in her “dead” eyes.
“Diamonds! No, gold. Gold rings. I love jewellery ...”
Okay, she says: “The world between the living and the dead has always been permeable for me.”
It was no surprise to her toddler self, for example, when Aunty Lily walked through the wallpaper with a man in a tailored three-piece and dispatched Pardington to the kitchen to report her death.
“Because in our family, grandma was like that, everybody just took it for granted ... for me, it was normal. And because I knew what to expect, when I had my brain injury, when I fell out of my body in the A&E, I already knew what was happening and it was just like my grandma told me ... there’s never been a time in my life when the spirit world wasn’t just ‘there’.”
In museums, when she is photographing manu, she sits with a bird and sees potential compositions. Then, she says, she makes a series of decisions – aesthetic, intuitive and spiritual – but the final images surprise even her.
“I just move past the body and concentrate on that bird, the thing that it was, the soul of that bird and then it comes to life through the camera.”
Some of the birds she photographs are more than 100 years old. They are in varying states of repair. Their eyes might be dull, dusty or the wrong size. The reimagined eyes in the birds of Taharaki Skyside were born when Pardington was looking at a photograph of a kārearea hunting a tūī and saw a landscape in an iris.
“You have to just be ready for these things. I’d been thinking about it for quite a while and I just decided, yeah, ‘this is what I’m supposed to be doing’.”
Placing the birds in landscapes where they might have lived was important because, in their death, they are frequently moved far from home: “I was in Berlin and there were just drawers full of huia, just falling to dust. They don’t have money to look after them. I’d love to see them all repatriated, for DNA analysis and things like that.”
She scoured antique stores for high-quality historic postcards. Recalls driving down Auckland’s Dominion Rd, despairing she’d find enough to meet the vision (and its deadlines). Her phone rang. A collector from Nelson was divesting his obsession – was she interested?
“I met him at a cafe in Timaru. I just spent a couple of hours just going through his boxes and he sold a swag of beauties to me ... thank you God. Thank you Universe.”
The Venice Biennale is often described as the Olympics of the art world.
“I don’t want to really get attached to that,” says Pardington. “With all projects, big or small, I want to do my best. I want to make sure that my integrity and vision as an artist is supported. As long as that is happening, then I will do my very best and that’s going to be enough because you’re getting 100% from me.
“You only get one shot at this. And I feel quietly confident.”
Taharaki Skyside opens in Venice on May 9 and runs until November 22. Slow Burn opens at Te Papa, Wellington on February 28.
New Zealand At Venice
New Zealand’s first national exhibition at the Venice Biennale was in 2001, when Aotearoa was represented by Jacqueline Fraser and Peter Robinson.
Artists selected to participate in subsequent years were Michael Stevenson (2003), et al. (2005), Francis Upritchard and Judy Millar (2009), Michael Parekowhai (2011), Bill Culbert (2013), Simon Denny (2015), Lisa Reihana (2017), Dane Mitchell (2019) and Yuki Kihara (2022).
There was no national pavilion in 2024, however eight Māori artists were selected to take part in the Biennale’s international exhibition, and a large-scale installation by the Mataaho Collective was awarded a prestigious Golden Lion.
In a change for this year’s biennale, Creative New Zealand appointed Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū as its exhibition delivery partner and it, in turn, proposed Pardington.
Gallery director Blair Jackson expects audiences will, initially, be wowed by the beauty of the work that will be exhibited at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pieta (La Pieta), near the biennale’s main exhibition hall.
“If they walk away with some kind of understanding about Fiona’s practice and the role of birds in her work and the many kind of understandings that might bring to people, in terms of ecology and colonisation. The works are so full of so many meanings ...
“I think it’s going to be quite immersive and incredibly impactful.”
Pardington’s Venice project is curated by Chloe Cull and Felicity Milburn. The latter says the works in Taharaki Skyside “carry vital relevance” underscoring the devastating losses – both ecological and cultural – that have occurred as the result of human impact and colonisation.”
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk.
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