Fiona Pardington


Fiona Dorothy Pardington 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,, 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 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. 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.
Pardington's brother Neil Pardington 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 analogue 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 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 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 included three tattooed warriors: Tangatahara and Piuraki and Matua Tawai. 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.
Pardington will represent New Zealand at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Fellowships, residencies and awards

1991 Visa Gold Art Award1991 Moet & Chandon Fellow, France1996 Frances Hodgkins Fellow1997 Visa Gold Art Award2001 Auckland Unitec Artist in Residence2006 Ngāi Tahu residency at Otago Polytechnic2010 Laureate Artistic Creations Project with the Musee du Quai Branly, France2011 Arts Foundation Laureate Award recipient2013 Colin McCahon House Artists’ Residency2016 Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres2017 Appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen's Birthday Honours, for services to photography.
In the 2025 King’s Birthday Honours, Pardington was promoted to Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to photography.

Notable exhibitions

;Solo exhibitions
;Group exhibitions

Publications

  • Stuart McKenzie, Rising to the Blow, Épernay, France : Moet et Chandon, 1992.
  • Kyla Macfarlane, One Night of Lovee, Hamilton: Waikato Museum of Art & History, 2001.
  • Gina Irish, The Heart Derelict, Dunedin: Otago Polytechnic, 2006.
  • Fiona Pardington, Journey of the Sensualist, Whanganui: McNamara Gallery, 2008.
  • Roger Boyce, Eros & Agape, Wellington: Suite Gallery, 2010.
  • Andrew Paul Wood, Blood & Roses, Christchurch: Jonathan Smart Gallery, 2011.
  • Andrew Paul Wood, Mushrooms: the champignons Barla, Christchurch: A.P. Wood Publishing, 2011.
  • Kriselle Baker and Elizabeth Rankin, Fiona Pardington: the pressure of sunlight falling, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2011.
  • Aaron Lister et al., Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2015.

Public collections