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The first time Fiona Pardington saw a Huia bird, it was in a Christmas pudding. The artist, then a young girl, bit into a piece of her Aunt Nelly’s cake and struck an old silver sixpence with an illustration of an extinct species.
Pardington spit out the coin and stared at a female bird with a long, curved beak and prominent wattles. She knew little about Huia. Their unique calls and proud tail feathers. As an adult, she learned that this bird was sacred to the Maori people of New Zealand and contained a great “mana”, or life force. However, habitat loss accelerated after European settlement, and the species suffered a major blow until it became extinct in the 1900s.
The artist, who is of Maori and Scottish descent, realizes today that her first encounter ironically freed the bird from the cultural symbolism that was responsible for its demise. Huia, like other native bird species, “have been plagued by our history,” she says.
Since the early 2000s, Pardington has worked to reintroduce New Zealand’s rare and extinct birds into their cultural contexts. She does it through the unusual means of taking studio portraits of taxidermied specimens. She hopes the bird’s carcass will help protect those still living in Aotearoa (New Zealand’s Maori name).
Pardington’s photographs will be displayed in the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at this spring’s Venice Biennale Art Exhibition. Her series “Taharaki Skyside” (“The Multitudes Skyside”) features 17 bird portraits, including extinct species such as the huia and wekau (“laughing owl”) and endangered parrot species such as the kaka (forest bird) and kea (the world’s only alpine parrot).
Birds are collected from museums in New Zealand and Australia. Some ended up in the British Museum as part of colonial-era collections, and some were returned. This is the very story of the plunder of the natural world in the age of empire, and the institutions that took into account its inheritance.
Photographing taxidermy is “not for the faint of heart,” the artist said. Each bird in the show is “an imperfect specimen…The birds you’re working with have been around for hundreds of years, and many are in a state of disrepair.” Damage and inaccurate anatomy are just two of the factors Pardington faces.
According to the museum. Land was cleared for farms, and exotic animals such as stoats, ferrets, and cats preyed on the owls. ” class=”image_large__dam-img image_large__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_large__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”4016″ width=”3200″load=’lazy’/>
She works with her brother and creative director Neil Pardington to shoot them in a studio backdrop. Some of the birds are looking down at her camera lens, while others are tilting their heads toward the sky. Paradoxically, still images of dead animals are full of life.
In Venice, the exhibition builds on eerie photographs by quoting Dante’s Divine Comedy. Medieval Italian poets imagined the southern hemisphere as a place of mountainous island purgatory, and Pardington positions New Zealand as a “bird purgatory,” writes Andrew Paul Wood in an essay accompanying the show. He added that these portraits “represent the sins of ecological destruction, human extinction and colonization. They judge us and are who we are.”
“Birds are our tupuna, our ancestors,” Pardington said of Maori beliefs. “In mythology, they are very important. There were many deeds that they performed that embodied very powerful qualities and told huge stories.”
She described the “wholesale consumption” of native birds, which in the past have been hunted, stuffed and exported for collections and fashion, as a “violation”.
“You might look at[the portrait]and think, ‘That’s a little white bird with a finch-like beak,’ but for me there’s all this mana and cultural depth behind it that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone outside of New Zealand,” she added.
To fill in the gaps in knowledge, Pardington commissioned experts, including Maia Nuku, curator of Oceania at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to write about the social significance of the show’s subjects and their unique ecology.
For thousands of years, New Zealand was an “alien planet”, the artist said. The lack of natural predators protects birds with unconventional lifestyles by most bird standards. For example, species such as the flightless parrot kakapo happily live, sleep, and nest on the ground. However, the introduction of predatory mammals such as rats and cats left them vulnerable. Currently, there are only 236 kakapo, mostly on islands that have pest control programs and are off-limits to the public.
New Zealand’s Department of Conservation lists 69 endangered bird species, 18 of which are at “immediate risk of extinction”. The most endangered species is the New Zealand little tern, Tara ichi, with a breeding population of fewer than 50 individuals, including 10 breeding females.
Although the country is known for its conservation-minded image, Pardington believes more investment is needed to stop invasive species such as wallabies and possums (both introduced from Australia). She is furious at the government’s “clean and green stance”, which last year lifted a ban on new oil and gas exploration, and at proposals to expand coal mining operations on the Denniston Plateau on the biodiversity-rich west coast of the South Island.
Quiet and stoic, her artwork is a testament to what is and can be lost when consumption and exploitation goes unchecked and unchallenged.
Pardington hopes the photo will influence Venice’s international audience. “Art is not just frivolous. It can affect people very deeply and move culture,” she said.
“In the arts, people can be very politically picky,” she said, but she has intentionally chosen a quieter register. “I talk to people about difficult topics in a way that brings them closer together. So when I’m talking to them, I may only whisper, but they hear me.”
“I think a lot more can be done when it comes to love, respect and beauty,” she added.
The Venice Biennale opens on May 9th and runs until November 22nd. The New Zealand Pavilion is located at the Santa Maria della Pietà Institute, Calle della Pietà, Castello 3703.
