Photographer Neil Pardington could be mistaken for a better-looking John Malkovich.
The director/producer/designer/writer has just had a full-body massage, and a baby girl. His calm, artistic air evokes that Malkovichian charm, which settles itself like dew on his photography.
Pardington snaps oddly fascinating objects in the hidden spots of our national museums and reveals them in our galleries.
This time it’s Wellington’s turn.
The Vault: Neil Pardington opens at the City Gallery on January 29. This photographic series records the strange world of weird and sometimes unrecognisable collections of objects hidden in museums such as Te Papa, the Rotorua Museum of Art and History, and the Christchurch Art Gallery.
“They are storage vaults but I like the conceptual connection and a camera is collating images in the same way a museum collects images. The nature of the project is like a museum putting a collection together,” he says.
Pardington has prowled around the back rooms of museums and art galleries since 1985. He has worked for Te Papa and as an in-house designer for the National Art Gallery.
Decisions surrounding what we keep as a nation and what we throw away are made in these places, he says. The Vault suggests that history is formed by a network of both rational and irrational decisions and what we keep - computer parts, whale skeletons, stuffed polar bears, congregations of mannequins and layers of monkeys – become our history.
“The thing I loved about the project is the way objects describe the sense of our whole culture because the things that end up in museums are objects that we think are important to us culturally.
“Most of the time I’ve been turning up to spots I’ve never seen before and responding to what’s out there – so it’s quite intuitive. Not knowing what something is and then having to find out the history of it later,” he says.
A piece of computer junk turned out to be an important piece of NZ’s historic jigsaw puzzle.
“It was the control console from the Wanganui computer ‘Big Brother’ from the ‘70s. It had George Orwell 1984 written all over it. A guy I knew in passing – Neil Roberts – blew himself up in the foyer of the building in protest. So what looked like a piece of junk turned out to be an important part of human history.”
Juxtaposed beside a whale skeleton, the computer shot made the cut.
Pardington used sheet film rather than digital for The Vault which slowed the process down and meant fewer photographs were taken.”
Pardington had not formed his vision for The Vault before he started shooting. Preparation and structure was essential – “similar to making a film”, he says. Like his doppelganger John Malkovich, Pardington is a movie-maker. He produced For Good and directed and co-wrote The Dig with Elizabeth Knox which was an Official Selection at Cannes International Film Festival in 1994.
“I think it’s whatever I’m doing at the time that makes me ‘what I am’,” he says. “As a child I spent hours drawing and painting on my own. I grew up in a small town so there was no access to an art gallery but because of that I spent hours looking at books of Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci. I thought: ‘How can I draw trees like that’ and I was obsessed with National Geographic.”
The Vault: Neil Pardington, City Gallery, January 29 – April 25.

THE original ‘Big Brother’, or National Law Enforcement Data Base, was switched off in 2005 after nearly 30 years in operation.
Booted in 1976, it recorded every traffic and criminal conviction, car and gun licence and the personal details of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders, as well as allowing police, Land Transport, and the justice system, to share information for the first time.
On November 18, 1982, young anarchist, Neil Roberts, 22, breached security at the computer centre and blew himself up with a gelignite bomb.
“This punk won’t see 23. No future” was tattooed across his chest.
The ‘Incis project’, which ran for several years and cost millions of dollars over budget, failed to replace the system and police transferred the information from the Wanganui computer, which moved to Auckland in the ‘90s, to a new $20 million system – the National Intelligence Application in 2005.