Neil Pardington
The Order of Things

Neil Pardington is of Māori (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe, Kāti Waewae) and Scottish ancestry. He is one of New Zealand’s most established and widely exhibited contemporary photographers. His recent series of works The Clinic and The Vault, photographed over a ten-year period, document the operating and storage areas within hospitals and museums. These critically acclaimed works take into account the history and practices of medicine and of collecting.

This exhibition brings together two bodies of work – a selection of images from the well-know series The Vault, and the first works from a new, related series The Order of Things.

Taking its name from the seminal book by Michel Foucault, The Order of Things documents scientific collections in museums. Taxonomy – the science of naming, describing and classifying organisms – gives structure to the series, with each genus presented as single major work hung en masse in a grid structure as a typology.