Fiona Pardington's giant bird portraits at Venice Biennale

Fiona Pardington, a photographer of Māori descent (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu) and Scottish heritage (Clan Cameron of Erracht), has produced a collection of large portraits featuring extinct and endangered birds from Aotearoa New Zealand for the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion. Titled 'Taharaki Skyside,' the series showcases species like the toroa (southern royal albatross), kākāpō, huia, and tawaki, captured against black velvet using a 102-megapixel medium-format camera with extended exposure times. Pardington seeks to convey the wairua (spirit) of each bird, enlarging their eyes and overlaying them with historical landscape images from vintage postcards. The portraits, displayed at human scale, aim to provoke thoughts on birds' spiritual roles as psychopomps in mythology. Her interest in avian photography began in the early 2000s after discovering letters from the 19th-century Deans family in Canterbury. She honors each bird with a karakia (incantation) prior to her work. The collection features specimens from the South Canterbury Museum, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Canterbury Museum, and Australian Museum, including a huia that was hunted to extinction, a moho (South Island takahē) that was kept at the British Museum for a century before its return, and a kākā kura with a unique color morph.