Story by Jennifer Harris
An almost-black photograph shines out—somehow—amid the treasures of the gallery of Arts of Oceania in The Met.
An intriguing photograph of an extinct bird joined other works from New Zealand in The Met in 2025. Solitary Female Huia by Fiona Pardington (2006, inkjet print, reprinted 2024) is one of a series of confronting, mournful bird photographs, several of which can be seen at the Venice Biennale now and through until November 2026. The Met exhibits just one photograph from this remarkable group, but it is such a compelling work that much can be learned from it about the artist, her philosophy and the cultural traditions she draws on.
Fiona Pardington describes the power of photography as “a beautiful hesitation” that seems to stop time and, therefore, has the potential to capture back the spirit of a lost life. She ascribes personhood to the birds in her art, and characterizes her photographs as “portraits”, making them human scale, framing them just as anyone would for a human. The emphasis on portraiture is an attempt to find—or return—life to what we have killed in the name of culture and science. In the brilliant shine of the huia’s feathers, we seem to see its lost life reflected.
In the Arts of Oceania, this arresting portrait is unmissable in its technical difference from all surrounding Indigenous works and its refusal to be categorized as either European or Māori. Surely, it must be both, we think, partly because the artist is descended from a Scottish family and three Māori iwi (people or tribes). Nevertheless, we struggle to understand how an artwork can emerge respectfully from two clashing traditions without undermining either. In light of the violent colonial history of New Zealand, we ask, how can this art photograph not be holding one human group up against the other…to critique, to judge? And yet, Pardington goes beyond the human and attempts to return to the essence of the huia itself.
Pardington does not ask the huia (heteralocha acutirostris) to represent humans, although you might see aspects of people you know in this bird, nor does she ask the huia to bear our human narratives which is the most common metaphoric and allegorical way that European art exploits animals. Her own humanity and distance from the bird is acknowledged technically in the bleeding of photographic pigment into the white border. Of course, she could create a photograph with crisp edges, but that could seem domineering in the context of this huia and other huias’ fatal collision with humans. The bleeding edge also suggests the “hesitation” that she seeks in her work, even provisionality, both of which point to flux, life and death.
Solitary Female Huia is a photograph of an extinct New Zealand songbird, a specific bird that had the misfortune to be caught in the prime of life and killed for a museum. Gutted and taxidermied, it was added to a collection and put on display. Saving this one bird would not have saved the huia species. European New Zealanders’ attempts at protection in 1892 came far too late, despite the enthusiasm for avian conservation of Lord Onslow, governor of New Zealand (1888-1892), who even named his baby son “Huia.” Tragically, Huia died at only 31 after being paralyzed in a diving accident. The failure of conservation protection was graphically illustrated when the Duke of York (later George V) visited in 1901. He was gifted with a huia feather which was stuck jauntily in his hat and thereby started a fashion trend that added to the looming catastrophe. Hunting, steady loss of habitat and fashion combined lethally. By 1907, the huia, with its magnificent black plumage, was gone forever.
Unusually for species in general, the superb huia female was heavier than the male, and longer, about 19 inches to the male’s 18 inches. Their wingspan was 23-25 inches. Mating for life, their different beaks were complementary. The male beak was used for stabbing into rotting wood and exposing insect nests, while the longer beak of the female was adapted for delving into the holes and extracting food. The long beak in The Met photograph confirms this huia is female. From the human point of view, their successful hunting partnership was of less interest than the majestic, metallic, bluish-greenish black feathers. In Pardington’s photograph, the shine on the glossy, inky bird is the first thing that you notice.
For Māori, the feathers were particularly prized, especially the 12 long tail feathers of each bird, tipped with their stunning contrast of bands of white. Māori chiefs wore the tail feathers as a sign of their nobility and status. The feathers were taonga or cultural treasures and were also traded and gifted.
Before Pardington turned to representing birds, she was well known for her human portraits that interrogate the body and gender identity. She is also acclaimed for her photographs of museum objects, especially of Māori artifacts in museums. Her work adds to the body of scholarly criticism on one of the main issues around museums, that is, the question of the life or death of objects once they are accessioned, or cataloged, by a museum. The aim of museums in almost all cases is to preserve objects, to prevent them degrading physically once they enter museum care. That, of course, means that the object must be plucked from daily life, the very place where it had lived. For many critics, ‘museumification’ and ‘musealisation’ encompass metaphoric killing of the everyday life and use of an object, and for The Met huia, an actual killing. The museum process thus embraces and hastens death.
It is in this space of inquiry about life and death, museums freezing the life out of artefacts, and colonial memory that Pardington probes, challenging the viewer uncomfortably with death brought about by colonizers—and death coming for us all. Pardington’s extraordinarily rich portrait of this one huia pushes us to contemplate existence, conscience and colonization.
Birds are often understood to be psychopomps, that is, creatures that lead us after our deaths to the underworld. There are many well-known examples of psychopomps, for example, Charon, who appears as a vicious figure in the bottom right-hand corner of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. He rows the dead across the Rivers Styx and Acheron, from our everyday world to a dark eternity.
In addition to the psychopomp aspect, there is an inescapable grieving quality to Solitary Female Huia that leads us back to 16th century vanitas painting. A vanitas is a memento mori, the thing that reminds us we will die. Skulls, burnt-out candles and hourglasses are familiar from European still lifes in this tradition. In the midst of life, we are always in death. Life and death are two sides of the same coin; awareness of one sharpens our apprehension of the other.
In her portraits of animals, all of them dead and taxidermied in museums, Pardington restates the power of life as she seeks out, in Māori terms, the mauri (life force) in the dead. One of the ways that she achieves animation is to include a landscape in the eye of the bird. This is more noticeable in the birds’ portraiture in the Venice Biennale, but if you stand close in The Met, you might be able to see a tiny landscape reflected in the huia’s eye. Landscape is imagined to be alive, vibrantly in touch with what was once a living creature, providing habitat and sustaining it with food and water.
Today, the fine but fatally alluring feathers of the huia are protected rigorously, with permits necessary for trading and owning. Very few are permitted to leave NZ. Sadly, it is too late to save the species, more than a century too late.
Fiona Pardington’s intense, spiritually probing works can be seen in many galleries around the world. She was born in Devonport, New Zealand in 1961.