Fiona Pardington | |
|---|---|
 Pardington in 2017 | |
| Born | Fiona Dorothy Cameron 1961 (age 62–63) Devonport, New Zealand |
| Education | Elam School of Fine Arts (BFA, 1984; MFA, 2003; DocFA, 2013) |
| Known for | Photography |
| Awards | Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2016) Arts Foundation Laureate Award (2011) Visa Gold Art Award (1991, 1997) |
| Website | fionapardington |
Fiona Dorothy Pardington MNZM (born 1961[ citation needed ]) is a New Zealand artist, her principal medium being photography.
Pardington was born Fiona Dorothy Cameron in Devonport, and was brought up on Auckland's Hibiscus Coast, where she attended Orewa College. [1] She descends from three Māori iwi, (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe and Ngāti Kahungunu), and the Scottish Clan Cameron of Erracht. [2] Knowing that she wanted to become a photographer from the age of six, Pardington studied photography at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1984. [3]
In 2003, Pardington graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts with a Master of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) and in 2013 graduated with a Doctor of Fine Arts in photography with a doctoral thesis titled Towards a Kaupapa of Ancestral Power and Talk. [4] [5] She has throughout her career held the positions as a lecturer, tutor, assessor and moderator on photography, design and fine arts programmes at universities and polytechnics throughout New Zealand. [6]
Pardington's brother Neil Pardington (11 months her junior) is also a well-known photographer and book designer. [7]
Early in her career, Pardington worked from a feminist viewpoint to explore themes of love and sex, the representation and perception of the body, and the construction of gender and identity. [8] She specialised in 'pure' or analogue darkroom techniques, most notably hand printing and toning. [9]
In the 1980s, borrowing from early, highly romanticized pictorialist photography, Pardington challenged the social construction of the eternal feminine by making theatrical photographs of the female nude.[ citation needed ]
In 1990, Pardington won the Moet et Chandon New Zealand Art Foundation Fellowship. [1] She won the Visa Gold Art Award in 1991 for Soft Target, a work framed with beaten, studded copper and gold-painted wood, that is encrusted with contradictory religious images and texts. [10]
Pardington was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago in both 1996 and 1997. In 1997 Pardington won the Visa Gold Art Award for a second time with Taniwha, 1996, a close up of a bar of soap, a colonial relic with an appropriated Māori name. [11]
In 2001, Pardington was the Auckland Unitec Institute of Technology Artist in Residence and began a body of work examining extant collections of cultural objects or taonga (treasures) in New Zealand's museums.[ citation needed ]
In 2005, the New Zealand Government gifted the Quai Branly Suite of Nine Hei tiki to the people of France. [12] Pardington is one of two Māori artists represented by the Musee du Quai Branly. [13]
In 2006, Pardington was the Ngāi Tahu artist in residence at the Otago Polytechnic, during which time she studied and photographed nests from the Otago Museum collection.[ citation needed ]
In 2010, Pardington completed a Laureate Artistic Creations Project with the Musée du Quai Branly, photographing more than fifty casts of Māori, Pacific and European heads, including casts of her Ngāi Tahu ancestors, held in the Musée Flaubert et d’Histoire de la Medecine in Rouen, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris and in the Auckland War Memorial Museum. [14] The casts made in the Pacific region during Dumont d’Urville’s last exploratory voyage of 1837–40 by the phrenologist Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier (1791–1871) included three tattooed warriors: Tangatahara and Piuraki (who are Ngāi Tahu) and Matua Tawai (from Kororāreka). Originally exhibited in vitrines outside the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Ahua: A beautiful hesitation, was selected to be exhibited at the 17th Biennale of Sydney in May 2010, and was allocated a dedicated gallery space in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. The series is illustrated in The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, published by Otago University Press and was exhibited at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth and Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2011. [15]
Pardington's work Ake Ake Huia, holds the auction record for a single New Zealand photograph having sold in 2010 for NZ$30,385. Pardington's major work, the Quai Branly Suite of Nine Hei Tiki, holds the auction record for a New Zealand photographic work having sold in 2010 for NZ$64,278. This was one of only two complete sets made by the artist with the other set having been gifted to the people of France by the New Zealand government. [16]
Pardington's still-life imagery made in 2012 and 2013 have a painterly quality that visually reference seventeenth-century painting traditions as well as the 16th-century vanitas traditions. [17] The images are not only memento mori in the provision of poetic signs of time passing and things dying – from dandelion clocks to gecko skins – but of cultures meeting across seas. [18]
In 2013, Pardington completed a three-month artist's residency at the Colin McCahon House in Titirangi, Auckland. [19]
A major survey of Pardington's work, Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation, featuring more than 100 photographs, was held at City Gallery Wellington in August – November 2015. [7] The exhibition travelled to Auckland Art Gallery in 2016. [20]
In February 2016, it was announced that Pardington had been selected by curator Fumio Nanjo for the first Honolulu Biennale, to be held in 2017. [21]
 |
The South Island is the largest of the three major islands of New Zealand in surface area, the other being the smaller but more populous North Island and sparsely populated Stewart Island. It is bordered to the north by Cook Strait, to the west by the Tasman Sea, to the south by the Foveaux Strait and Southern Ocean, and to the east by the Pacific Ocean. The South Island covers 150,437 square kilometres (58,084 sq mi), making it the world's 12th-largest island, constituting 56% of New Zealand's land area. At low altitudes, it has an oceanic climate. The major centres are Christchurch, with a metropolitan population of 521,881, and the smaller Dunedin. The economy relies on agriculture, fishing, tourism, and general manufacturing and services.
Dunedin is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. The city has a rich Māori, Scottish, and Chinese heritage.
New Zealand photography first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, and over time has become an important part of New Zealand art. A number of photography associations exist to support photographers in New Zealand.
Andrew Drummond is a New Zealand painter and sculptor. He attended University of Waterloo in Canada, graduating in 1976. He was a Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 1980.
Shane William Cotton is a New Zealand painter whose work explores biculturalism, colonialism, cultural identity, Māori spirituality, and life and death.
Michael Te Rakato Parekōwhai is a New Zealand sculptor and a professor at the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts. He is of Ngāriki Rotoawe and Ngāti Whakarongo descent and his mother is Pākehā.
Mark Adams is one of New Zealand's most distinguished photographers.
Shigeyuki "Yuki" Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent. In 2008, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; it was the first time a New Zealander and the first time a Pacific Islander had a solo show at the institution. Titled Shigeyuki Kihara: Living Photographs, the exhibition opened from 7 October 2008 to 1 February 2009. Kihara's self-portrait photographs in the exhibitions included nudes in poses that portrayed colonial images of Polynesian people as sexual objects. Her exhibition was followed by an acquisition of Kihara's work for the museum's collection.
Jacqueline Fraser is a New Zealand artist of Ngāi Tahu descent.
Areta Rachael Wilkinson is a New Zealand jeweller.
Rachael Rakena is a New Zealand artist.
Lonnie Hutchinson is a New Zealand artist of Māori, Samoan and European descent.
Christine Webster is a New Zealand visual artist and photographer.
Heather Straka is a New Zealand artist, based in Auckland, who primarily works with the media of painting and photography. Straka is well known as a painter that utilises a lot of detail. She often depicts cultures that are not her own, which has caused controversy at times. Her work engages with themes of economic and social upheaval in interwar China, the role of women in Arabic society and Māori in relation to colonisation in New Zealand. Eventually, the figure became important in Straka's practice and she began to use photographs as the starting point for some of her works and "Increasingly too the body feminine has become her milieu".
Hana Merenea O'Regan is a Māori language advocate and academic in New Zealand. She is a member of the Ngāi Tahu iwi (tribe).
The Mataaho Collective is a group of four New Zealand artists: Erena Baker, Sarah Hudson, Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau. They are known for their large scale fibre-based artwork. In 2024 the Mataaho Collective received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale.
Catherine Elizabeth Brown was a New Zealand Māori tohunga raranga, ceramicist, educator and netball coach. She affiliated to the Ngāi Tahu iwi. Brown played a pivotal role during her lifetime in educating New Zealanders about Māori arts as well as organising workshops, hui, conventions, and exhibitions on Māori arts, particularly Māori weaving. As well as educating and organising, Brown was an acknowledged master weaver and artist whose work was exhibited both nationally and internationally. Brown was awarded a Queen's Service Medal in 1995 as well as the Ngā Tohu ā Tā Kingi Ihaka award in 2000 in recognition of her contribution to Māori arts.
Marie Shannon is a New Zealand artist and educator who makes photography, video and drawing. Her artwork is in the collections of Te Papa, New Zealand's national museum, and Dunedin, Christchurch and Auckland city galleries.
Louise Mary Potiki Bryant is a New Zealand choreographer, dancer and video artist. She has choreographed a number of award-winning performances, and is a founding member of Atamira Dance Company. She designs, produces and edits videos of performances for music videos, dance films and video art installations. She was made an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate in 2019.
Ayesha Melody Green is a painter and artist from New Zealand. Her works are inspired by her Māori heritage and often use the kokowai pigment.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
