IamDrowzee

Neil Pardington

Neil Pardington is a New Zealand photographer who went behind the scenes of Whanganui Regional Museum in 2006 and the Canterbury museum in 2007. He is interested in the unseen spaces normally hidden from the public and simply used for the storage of objects not on display. He is fascinated by the idea of collecting and also did a later series of works in 2011 which explored a similar concept in an art gallery’s collection.

I find his work very interesting as it is both documentive, but also thought provoking. It lets you imagination run wild as you make up all these wild stories about how these objects could have come to be in the collection. Looking at the Canterbury museum series in particular a work stood out to me which sparks all of these things. Mammal Attic #1, was interesting t me personally as I could never recall seeing such an elephant on display in all by frequent visits to museum, it made me wonder how many more things are left undiscovered in museum store rooms. Clearly museums collect a vast range of objects and a lot of the time have not enough room to display them all at once, sometimes they have not room to storage them all either. They collect in an almost obsessive way, there is a drive as an institutional landmark to keep up to date with other museums, but also a drive out of passion for old artefacts and the untold stories behind them.