Fiona Pardington A108713 2019. Pigment inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. Courtesy the artist and Starkwhite. With thanks to Wellcome Collection | Science Museum Group
Fiona Pardington A220848 2019. Pigment inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. Courtesy the artist and Starkwhite. With thanks to Wellcome Collection | Science Museum Group
This exhibition is now closed
Orphaned faux hei tiki and a complex story of interaction, exchange and exploitation.
Māoriland was a nineteenth-century fiction that offered a romanticised ideal of Māori life and custom for an international market, while a colonial imposition was being forced upon Māori themselves. These faux hei tiki from the Wellcome Collection, London are part of that history – neither taonga nor mass-produced trinkets, their makers are unknown and their purpose was most likely trade to tourists and collectors.
The mystery and in-betweenness of these objects held an affinity for photographer Fiona Pardington, who is of Ngāi Tahu descent and produces critically important work through her whakapapa and relationships with international collections of Ngāi Tahu taonga.
Pardington’s reparative vision embraces the personality found in these objects, offering manaakitanga, kindness, by recognising and dignifying them as the orphans in a complex story of interaction, exchange and exploitation.
Exhibition toured by Starkwhite.
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Date:
31 January – 12 July 2020 -
Curator:
Lara Strongman -
Exhibition number:
1097
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Director's Foreword
Director’s Foreword
Welcome to the autumn issue of Bulletin. Here at the Gallery, we’re about to move into a major changeover as we rehang our upstairs collection galleries. When they reopen again on 10 April, the whole space will have been given over to a major new exhibition.
Commentary
Wellcome to Māoriland
London’s Wellcome Collection was founded by Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853–1936) in the year he died. An incredibly successful US-born, British pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Wellcome had a penchant for collecting medical and health-related artefacts, which formed the basis of the Collection. He didn’t restrict himself to the more obvious examples of early medical technology, however, but also collected in the area of folk remedies and indigenous cultural objects, which were largely acquired through London auction houses. Browsing the Wellcome Collection’s online catalogue, Aotearoa New Zealand photographer Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron) encountered what at first glance looked to be a number of heitiki; however, on closer inspection they did not seem quite right.
My Favourite
Fiona Pardington’s Still Life with Barley Grass and Freesia, Waiheke
The most magical book I held in my hands as a child was called Ratsmagic, and it belonged to my sister. It was a dark, threatening masterpiece of a picture book, in which a bluebird is kidnapped by a witch, right when she is due to lay her egg. The animals in the valley where she lives whisper to one another “Bluebird is with egg, BLUEBIRD IS WITH EGG” with a fierce and mythological importance. A clever rat is sent to save her from her terrible fate.
Commentary
Powerfully Present
In the last issue of Bulletin, to mark the 125th anniversary of women claiming the right to vote in Aotearoa New Zealand, our curators wrote about five significant – yet lesser-known – nineteenth and mid-twentieth-century works from the collection by women.
In this issue we focus on some contemporary works by women artists that assert a powerful presence in the collection – and which variously explore the charged politics of representation.
Commentary
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).
Commentary
The Camera as a Place of Potential
To Māori, the colour black represents Te Korekore – the realm of potential being, energy, the void, and nothingness. The notion of potential and the presence of women are what I see when I peek at Fiona Pardington’s 1997 work Moko. And I say peek deliberately, because I am quite mindful of this work – it is downright spooky. Moko is a photographic rendering of a seeping water stain upon the blackboard in Pardington’s studio, taken while she was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin in 1997.
Notes
Celebrate summer at Christchurch Art Gallery
Summer is here and it’s the perfect time to visit Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Experience incredible art, express your creativity through art courses and workshops, attend an artist talk, event or activity and explore your world in a new way through art.