For over two decades, Fiona Pardington has investigated the powers and limitations of photography — in particular, what the camera fails to capture and what it is able to suggest. Often swathed in gentle light, her exquisitely composed portraits aim to convey the rare and precious nature of her subjects, and to give them new and treasured lives.

Her series ‘Te mate o te aroha/The pain of longing’ 2002 depicts hei tiki pounamu (greenstone pendants) from the collection of the Okains Bay Museum, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Considered to be tāonga tuku iho (treasured heirlooms), hei tiki are handed from one generation to the next to connect wearers to a memory of tupuna (revered ancestors). A descendant of Te Wāhipounamu (‘the place of greenstone’) in Aotearoa’s South Island, Pardington is well aware of the cheap, plastic, commercialised tiki souvenirs sold in tourist outlets, and endeavours to return respect and cultural authority to these revered objects.

To investigate the ethics of museum collecting, classification and display, Pardington created a series of photographs of taxidermied native birds. Selecting species that are either thriving or threatened/extinct from the collection of the Whanganui Regional Museum, her images challenge scientific modes of documentation by approaching the subjects through the more poetic lenses of Māori literature, lore and legend.

Another body of work, the ‘Ahua: A beautiful hesitation’ series explores a group of 50 life-casts that French phrenologist Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier took on his 1837 journey through the Pacific with explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville. Pardington’s portraits of these life-casts from museum collections throughout New Zealand and Europe encourage us to reflect on the limitations of scientific methodologies, and the importance of art and memory in our understanding of who we are.