Fiona Pardington

Fiona Dorothy Pardington (born 1961) is a New Zealand artist, her principal medium being photography.
Early life and education.
Pardington was born Fiona Dorothy Cameron in Devonport, and was brought up on Auckland's Hibiscus Coast, where she attended Orewa College. She descends from three Māori iwi, (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe and Ngāti Kahungunu), and the Scottish Clan Cameron of Erracht. 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.
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. She has throughout her career held the position of lecturer, tutor, assessor and moderator on photography, design and fine arts programmes at universities and polytechnics throughout New Zealand.
Pardington's brother Neil Pardington (11 months her junior) is also a well-known photographer and book designer.
Career, themes and style.
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. She specialised in 'pure' or analog photography darkroom techniques, most notably hand printing and toning.
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.
In 1990 Pardington won the prestigious Moet et Chandon New Zealand Art Foundation Fellowship. 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.
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.
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.
In 2005 the New Zealand Government gifted the "Quai Branly Suite of Nine Hei tiki" to the people of France. Pardington is one of two Māori artists represented by the Musee du Quai Branly.
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.
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. 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 Kororareka). 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.
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.
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. 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.
In 2013 Pardington completed a three-month artist's residency at the Colin McCahon House in Titirangi, Auckland.
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. The exhibition travelled to Auckland Art Gallery in 2016.
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.