Fiona Pardington's childish photographs make profound statements

Childish Things 
Fiona Pardington

Starkwhite Gallery
Until September 19

In advance of her big show at Wellington’s City Gallery, Fiona Pardington has an intriguing exhibition at Starkwhite.

The images are of parts of letters written by the children of the early Christchurch surgeon and amateur scientist, Dr Alfred Baker, who was also an artist and photographer.

While he had extensive correspondence with scientists Haast, Huxley and Darwin, Fiona Pardington was drawn to the letters of the children “by the delicate fine paper, iron gall inks, smudged and blotched marks, spelling mistakes and a smeared fingerprint (a tantalising forensic touch).

“I immediately had an aching feeling in my bones, for the land, the birds impacted by the Pākehā kids and their guns, gulls and adventures. I could feel their father standing there with his camera, and marvelled at the wobbly copperplate words giving a rare and earnest view into a child's world in the Christchurch bush teeming with a luxuriance of native wildlife I could only mourn today.

“I was equally horrified and fascinated that the Barker children's daily activities seemed to centre on killing: tracking, shooting, skinning birds all day, punctuated by looking for flowers and falling out of trees, all of which seemed to qualify them as junior naturalists in the ways of their father's friends Mr Buller and Mr Haast.

“We read in these children's stories to their Uncle a softly reflected, innocently faceted view of important men looking for Moa, the siblings finding puffballs and rowboats, and their father taking photographs," she says.

The elegant, slightly wobbly copperplate writing of the children at first glance looks like embroidered homilies, phrases of moral righteousness or guidance. They also shown the children themselves struggling to express and compose their correspondence with letters crossed out and poor spelling corrected with various additions.

From these letters Ms Pardington has extracted and photographed individual words, short passages and almost whole pages. While the full letters may give an insight into the lives of the children, only a couple contain relevant information such as a reference to Mr Haast hearing a Moa bird and a description of a grey feathered Tuuy (tui).

Many of the photographs seem to relate to the artist herself and she seems taken with the notion of reaching back to the middle of the 19th century to connect with another photographer.

One of the images is of the words “I am”, which relates to Colin McCahon’s enigmatic statement and connects with Ms Pardington’s recent residency at the McCahon House in Titirangi and the body of work she produced which also referenced Mr McCahon.

Another image is of the word “photography” which the child initially spells as “potogy” before adding the missing “h” and “raph”. The word appears in a fuller account: “I will send you a picture of myself. Papa has been printing photography.”

Other works feature various words – “paper”, “me your”, “I hope” and “believe” initially written without the first two e’s.

All the images of the calligraphy are displayed on a giant scale in ornate black frames making the words and phrases take on an importance and significance.

The truncated sentences that the photographer presents create a surreal world of fleeting images and ideas. They become secret codes, words imbued with magical or sacred qualities.

This body of work is part of a continuing interest in using pre-exiting sources of information, giving them new meanings or expanding on the original.

One of the first in this line of work was the Visa Award-winning photograph “Taniwha” where she photographed a block of Taniwha soap. She has also explored other “found” objects in her series.

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