Looking Up to You
Fiona Pardington and Cat Auburn
An exhibition at the Courtenay Place Park light box project.
It is difficult to imagine two artists with more different practices working
together than Wellington-based Cat Auburn and Auckland-based Fiona
Pardington. Auburn is a young emerging artist best known for her
sculptural practice, while Pardington is one of New Zealand’s most
distinguished photographers. While it is perfectly natural for a younger
artist to be inspired by an established artist and perhaps allude to or
imitate them in homage, it is more unusual in the modern era for this to
become the basis of a significant project, and even less usual for it to
result in a collaboration of such compelling synergy. Just as the
photograph once borrowed from the aesthetics of painting for added
authority and authenticity, in the contemporary context photography
borrows light boxes from advertising and marketing.
Fiona Pardington (2012)
Cat's Cat, Drake's Feather
and Skull
So anomalous is Pardington and Auburn’s Looking Up to You that I
struggle to find a structure in which to easily talk about it, so I will resort
to the classics. Philostratus the Elder was a Greek author who flourished
in the third century and one of his most famous works was the Imagines
(or Images), a collection of short essays ostensibly describing sixty-four
mostly mythologically themed paintings, supposedly seen by him in
Naples but also quite possibly entirely fictional, in poetic detail or
ekphrasis. The entire work is framed in terms of explaining art, its symbols
and meaning, to a ten-year-old boy. Consider Courtenay Place as a grand
outdoor gallery, primed to lure the eye of even the most jaded flâneur on
their Passeggiata.
Let us begin with an image Pardington has created, a still life using an
object from Auburn’s childhood – a small ceramic cat that at some point
has been broken and glued back together. The cat is a caricature,
facsimile (twice over as a photograph) of the living, breathing domestic
house cat, the scaled down, softened and civilised version of the King of
Beasts, the lion. The presence of cats is also a punning play on Auburn’s
first name. Looking Up to You is full of such rhizomatic interplays. It
suggests something of Wittgenstein’s dilemma regarding the limits of
communication – all language is contingent. What we think we
understand is meant by an utterance or iteration will never exactly match
the original concept.
1908 Coat of Arms Competition
Entries – “Nostra Patria Nostro
Generi” (detail) designed by “ Te
Waipounamu” [Archives
Reference: IA 9 30/30 52]
Archives New Zealand The
Department of Internal Affairs
Te Tari Taiwhenua
The cat finds an echo in another image of one of the favourite designs
proposed for the New Zealand coat of arms in 1908 following the
granting of official Dominion status. The shield has two supporters, a
British lion and a creature with the top half of a horse and the bottom
half of a fish is called a hippocampus – the seahorse. Confusingly it is
also the name of the seahorse-shaped part of the brain heavily involved
with memory. This has a rather startling frisson with the photograph of a
maquette for a sculpture Auburn conceived before she ever knew of this
coat of arms – an unprecedented chimera half horse and half lion. The
only mythological creature that comes close is the hippogryph – part
horse, part lion and part eagle, supposedly the offspring of a griffin and a
mare.
Auburn’s After ‘Still Life with Dying Purple Dahlia’ is a re-creation, or
perhaps a kind of Baudrillardian facsimile of Pardington’s still life
photograph Still Life with Dying Purple Dahlia’. While Pardington’s original
is full of objects that possess personal significance peculiar to the
photographer, Auburn captures some of the aura of authenticity by
sourcing her replacement objects in season in Wellington; the lilies from
her local dairy, the tamarillo from Miramar New World. The same
scenario applies to After ‘Still Life with Dahlia, Sand and Takahikare Wings’
In Eiffel Tower, Gorse, Rhinestones, Auburn using objects that Fiona gave to
Cat from her past still life photographs including the Eiffel Tower
souvenir trinket. Auburn’s use of gorse alludes to both Pardington’s
interest in using the plant in future, but also to the Wellington site where
Auburn rides her horse and sourced the gorse.
Cat Auburn (2012)
After ‘The Champignons Barla’
Photography by Steve Unwin
The autobiographical allusions are by no means exclusive. Auburn feels
perfectly at liberty to place some ironical aesthetic distance between
herself and Pardington as well, for instance Auburn responds to a still life
photograph of a wax and plaster fungus from Pardington’s The
Champignons Barla series with her own photographic still life of a plastic
air freshener in the shape of a mushroom. The evident ironic humour
lifts the interaction above the level of merely homage, to something
approaching a cheeky challenge with a solitary Magic Mushroom. It is a
masterful illustration of semiotics in action, raising a multitude of
questions regarding authorship, appropriation and interpretation. One is
reminded a little of Jorge Luis Borges 1939 short story “Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote” in which the fictional author of the title attempts
to re-create line by line the entirety of Cervantes famous picaresque
novel.
Context and creators also find their way in. Auburn incorporates
Pardington herself in a fetching photographic portrait of the artist based
on Pardington’s 1996-2001 series One Night of Love. And while still on the
subject of portraits, the city of Wellington itself makes an appearance – a
sort of mise-en-abyme recursion, the city within the city – in the form of
two historical photographs from the Wellington City Archives: 1920s,
Wellington City Council Rest Rooms for Women and Children, Manners
Street (A 8479) and an image from 1910 of Courtenay Place, looking
west (Tourist Series 2357). Courtenay Place becomes an art gallery, a
narrative, a bestiary of imaginary creatures, and a dipping into the
encyclopaedias of two oeuvres. The work is completely context specific –
it could not exist and be meaningful anywhere else.
Andrew Paul Wood
Cat Auburn (2012)
Portrait of Fiona Pardington as ‘One
Night of Love’
Photography by Steve Unwin
catauburn.com
steveunwinphotography.com