The Order of Things by Neil Pardington for SCAPE Public Art Season 2019

Neil Pardington The Order of Things 2019. Image courtesy of SCAPE Public Art. Photo by Heather Milne.

How we arrange things says a lot about what we value. The Order of Things presented larger than life wet specimens from museum collections: once wild animals, birds and fish captured and preserved in jars. Neil Pardington turned the spotlight on these rarely seen museum objects, taking them out of the back room and putting them upfront. Here they split out of the museum into the park beyond, to the former wetlands that now form Hagley Park.

Meticulously named and ordered, what do these ghostly creatures tell us about our world? Museums, like science, use a natural history classification system first developed by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the 1700s. In Aotearoa, this system replaced mātauranga Māori, a genealogically-based way of understanding which tracked important relationships and provided morality tales. Such stories, for instance, described the tuatara as a close relative of the shark.

The erasure of these connections is one thread in the dismantling of Māori histories and beliefs through colonisation. Titled after the seminal book by Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, showing us that the act of naming and classifying is not a given, but instead, a set of conventions that shape our understanding.