A Beautiful Hesitation

Overview

Fiona Pardington is among New Zealand’s most celebrated photographers. A Beautiful Hesitation, the largest exhibition of her work to date is a touring exhibition curated by Wellington’s City Gallery and comprises over 100 works, spanning three decades of artistic practice. The title of the exhibition comes from the artist’s description of photography as a ‘hesitation in time’.

Pardington’s still-life photographs bring a non-traditional quality to the medium, delving into museum collections to re-present collected objects, specimens and castings, turning historical artefacts into something other. Incorporating salvaged material from second hand stores, or found objects from New Zealand coastlines, Pardington builds the mise-en-scene – a unique response to each article. An object might call for stark surroundings to be evaluated through her camera lens, or an elaborately built staging that brings a tension and contrasting themes into play.

A Beautiful Hesitation acts as a retrospective, giving audiences opportunity to re-visit or experience previous works for the first time. Curated in the exhibition are photographs from the 2001 series One Night of Love – reworked ‘girly shots’ from source material found discarded by a photographer in an abandoned London building. Meanwhile, the 1994 series The Medical Suite fetishises the human body in an opposing and confronting way, as a site of disease and deformity seen in images from medical journals. Always challenging, often beautiful, Pardington’s photographs act “as a portal between the material and immaterial, the known and unknown, and acceptable and transgressive behaviours”.

Image: My Mother's Roses, Pomegranates and Silver Platter of Ihumoana, Ripiro Beach 2013 courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland