Spectral Birds Endemic to New Zealand Find New Life in Fiona Pardington’s Portraits

There is an air of the spectral to Fiona Pardington’s recent photographs of birds. While they are actual specimens, captured in atmospheric light and exhibiting unique plumage and expressions, there’s something a little bit uncanny about them. Are they real? In a sense, yes, but they’re no longer alive. Some no longer even exist. For Pardington, who is of Māori and Scottish descent, natural history specimens provide a unique and striking look at nature. And the photos seen here, comprising part of her series Taharaki Skyside, are slated for the artist’s exhibition in the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year.

Pardington’s bold, large-scale portraits of birds native to New Zealand—known as Aotearoa in the Māori language—are all made in natural history collections around the country. The phantom-like depictions detail unique beaks, colors, and biological variations of the Fiordland penguin, with its bright yellow crest that looks like dramatic eyebrows, the South Island Takahe, which was thought extinct for a while before it was rediscovered in 1948, or the Tūī, with its tuft of white at the throat.

Pardington’s series also develops through a literary lens, especially in relation to the poetic works of Dante, who situates Purgatory on an island-mountain in the Southern Hemisphere in the Divine Comedy. The concept of crossing over from one realm to another is mirrored in the uncanniness of preserved animals in vitrines, illustrating the diversity of life while no longer possessing it. “Some birds, like the huia and whēkau (laughing owl), are long extinct; many others remain critically vulnerable,” says a statement.

Pardington’s images, set in museums, harken back to an earlier era of collecting, when egg-hunters and birders would seek prized specimens only to kill them and “preserve” them for posterity. This controversial practice occasionally rears its head, such as in the case of a researcher who killed an elusive kingfisher in 2015 to “collect” it for further research.

“Birds can symbolise familial love, romantic attachment, and ecological warnings. They can be intimations of mortality, and in my work, they can also represent individual people in my life. The ideas I am conjuring remind us of the integral significance of manu within te ao Māori (the Māori world) as sources of food and materials and intermediaries between human and divine worlds,” Pardington says.

Many of the endemic species she highlights are rare, such as the kākā kura, which is a color morph of the more common kākā parrot. And beyond their scientific significance, birds also play a sacred role for the Māori people, who refer to them as manu, messengers between this world and the next. “The ‘captured’ birds also reveal how museums classify, describe, frame, and celebrate or hide cultural narratives, influencing our understanding of the history and cultural legacies of Indigenous communities,” says a statement.

See Taharaki Skyside at the Venice Biennale from May 9 to November 22, and find more on Pardington’s Instagram.

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