Edward Hanfling, "Taking and Making: Fiona Pardington's Beautiful Hesitation in Auckland", Art New Zealand, No. 158, Winter 2016, pp. 82-85.
The article is a critical analysis of the exhibition of Fiona Pardington's photographs, "Beautiful Hesitation", at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.
From the concluding paragraph (p. 85):
"As much as I think I prefer the simple photographs to the extravagant ones, the exhibition makes me wonder if the impact of the former depends on the latter, and vice versa. I suspect that the contrasts are integral to the artist's sensibility; she needs to go off in all directions to be true to herself. What is good about her work is that it messes with preconceptions and expectations about 'good' and 'bad' photographs. She makes pictorialism look cool and postmodernism naff, and in the end all the styles and conventions seem like just different ways of making pictures rather than hard-won aesthetic principles of more or less contemporary relevance. The photographs, as much as the objects in them, veer between triviality and transcendence, invoke love and voyeurism and pain and pretension, get down and dirty as well as high and mighty, such that judgement becomes futile in the face of all these different ways of being human. Yes, some of it is wank, pure and simple, but that is human and wholesome too - and is it not a trusted adage that as an artist you should please yourself first?"