For more than two decades, Fiona Pardington has been photographing taonga (Māori cultural treasures) and natural history specimens in museums around the world. In the South Canterbury museum, she was struck by a collection of stuffed native birds which had been subject to taxidermy – many of them now extinct or endangered. They inspired a new human-scale portrait series of these manu (birds), revered within Māori culture as intermediaries between human and divine worlds. The resulting works will be exhibited at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Human-Scale Portraits
The portraits in the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion will be presented at human scale. ‘So suddenly you lose that idea of what you think a bird is and what your relationship is with them,’ Pardington explains. ‘I wanted to scale them up spiritually as well. The world over, something we have in common is a relationship to birds within our mythological systems and storytelling. Birds are often psychopomps: they move between the heavens and the underworld. They’re messengers.’
Capturing Spirit and Landscape
Pardington tries to capture the wairua (spirit) of each bird she photographs: ‘I’m looking for that life force that was already there. I’m thinking of that bird when it was alive in the past, before it was killed - or assassinated. Because they’re just like any other individual.’ Photographing the birds ‘feels like bearing witness,’ she says. ‘That’s the power of photography.’
Within each giant portrait, the bird’s eyes are also supersized. In each eye, Pardington has superimposed images of the landscapes in which that species lived, drawn from a trove of high-quality old black and white photographic postcards. ‘You get a reflection of where the bird is situated in time and place, in nature,’ she says.
Cultural Significance
Pardington has Maori (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu) and Scottish (Clan Cameron of Erracht) ancestry. Kākāpō (night parrots) are significant to the Ngāi Tahu tribe of Aotearoa’s south island: ‘They’re our taonga; they’re part of our culture,’ she says. These days, kākāpō are critically endangered and protected in sanctuaries.
One of the first birds Pardington photographed was a huia, which was hunted to extinction. ‘I have a karakia [incantation] that I use before working with each bird, which addresses it with respect. It’s a very quiet process. I’m acutely aware of it being in a museum. It’s been killed. It’s been stuffed – and sometimes it’s extinct. There’s levels of grief that you feel.’ Pardington’s portraits say: ‘Look what we have done. We’ve taken something alive, and in order to keep it, we’ve killed it. Why didn’t they put money into sanctuaries?’
Technical Approach
Pardington photographs the birds against black velvet, which ‘consumes the light’, and uses a 102-megapixel medium-format camera with long exposures: ‘I want it to look like the light is emanating from the animal.’ She counts herself lucky to have seen many tawaki in their natural habitat in the Fiordland region of southern Aotearoa. ‘It’s one of the wonders of the world down there, and being around dolphins and the penguin populations – for me, it doesn’t get better than that.’
Pardington began photographing birds in the early 2000s after reading letters from the Deans family, prominent settlers in 19th-century Canterbury. ‘The kids would take their guns and their dogs and go off into the bush and shoot birds – and I thought, which birds were in that area at the time? So I went to Canterbury Museum and … decided to make portraits of the birds. I call them portraits because animals, to me, have a personhood.’
Fiona Pardington: Taharaki Skyside will be exhibited at the Aotearoa New Zealand pavilion at the Venice Biennale from 9 May – 22 November 2026.
