Fiona Pardington Flora_Unicorn 2016. C-type photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland
Beyond The Fields We Know
In the canons of received taste, the unicorn figurine doesn’t rank terribly highly beyond kitsch. Sitting in your hand, it’s cutesy, twee, trivial and quaint (though a piece of master-worked Venetian glass from Murano is a pricey and collectable item).
On the other hand, kitsch is powered by sentimentality, and sentimentality is a valid human emotional response to the existential condition, a degree to love, hope and compassion. The snobbery and elitism of taste is an artificial construct designed to separate the sheep from the goats, a panjandrum to demarcate people into social boxes of U and Not-U.
Photographer Fiona Pardington has a knack for finding and returning the mana and spirit of the forgotten and unconsidered, and under her lens the unicorn figurine transforms back into the majestic magical guardian of medieval legends, a symbol of the wonder lurking just beyond our mundane, illuminated from within and transformed by light.
We are in the presence of immanence and transcendence. It hides in the heart of the humble and everyday. Beyond the fields we know, lies Avalon.
Related
Exhibition
Tiki: Orphans of Māoriland
31 January – 12 July 2020
Orphaned faux hei tiki and a complex story of interaction, exchange and exploitation.
Exhibition
Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation
9 July – 6 November 2016
A survey exhibition by a leading New Zealand photographer explores sex, death and the female gaze.
Collection
Fiona Pardington Still Life with Barley Grass and Freesia, Waiheke
“Every object has a particular meaning for me, a certain feeling, an emotion, a history – often a history I can sense, even though I can’t tell you its story.” —Fiona Pardington
Fiona Pardington’s still-life photographs assemble a myriad collection of objects that carry highly personal meanings for the artist. Objects, both found and owned, are assembled in the European still-life tradition but on the artist’s terms. Water held in containers, like the vase in this work, represent South Island creeks and rivers reflecting Fiona’s connection to Te Waipounamu through her Ngāi Tahu and Clan Cameron heritage.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Fiona Pardington Believe
History often only tells one side of the story. This photograph by Fiona Pardington was inspired by visiting the archive of Dr A. C. Barker at Canterbury Museum. He was the ship’s surgeon on the Charlotte Jane, the first colonial ship to reach Canterbury, and made photographs of early Christchurch. The letters his children wrote to their uncle in the 1860s provide a view of early Canterbury childhood from the perspective of colonising settlers.
Fiona has said: “I was drawn in by the delicate fine paper, iron gall inks, smudged and blotched marks, spelling mistakes and a smeared fingerprint – a tantalising forensic touch. I immediately had an aching feeling in my bones, for the land, the birds impacted by the Pākehā kids and their guns, gulls and adventures. I could feel their father standing there with his camera, and marvelled at the wobbly copperplate words giving a rare and earnest view into a child’s world in the Christchurch bush teeming with a luxuriance of native wildlife I could only mourn today.”
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )