Fiona Pardington: Ake Ake Huia

The Canterbury Museum has an amazing collection of taxidermied Huia – it’s a very sad thing to open up a great big metal cabinet and see so many Huia, but that’s part of my job, is to look at things that are extinct and talk about the uncomfortable things. I hadn’t considered that I would take this photograph initially, it was more of a sideline photograph. I had gone in to photograph a profile of a particularly beautiful female Huia that had been caught in the 1880s, she had a very long beak and it’s a well-known work now. This was something that I did right at the end – people have said that it looks like a Victorian woman’s dress, a black mourning dress I thought. If you look at the end of the feathers you can see that they’re slowly being worm away, for me that’s the beginning of the end, because the peculiar thing about taxidermied birds in museums, that I don’t think that Buller thought about, was that in the end, because there’re organic matter, they are just going to fall into dust.

坎特伯雷博物馆收藏了数目可观，且质量颇好的兼嘴垂耳鸦标本。打开一个巨大的铁皮箱，向人展示如此之多的垂耳鸦们，是一件令人怅然的事。然而我的工作就是向人展示已经湮灭的生物，以及和人谈论让人不舒服的话题。我一开始并没有认真的把这幅作品当成艺术摄影看待，单纯的以记录摄影的方式拍下了这张档案照片。这是一只被捕捉于1880年代的特别漂亮的雌性垂耳鸦，她有一根非常长的鸟喙。时至今日，这幅照片已经被当成一件艺术品而为人所知了。人们说她看起来像是穿着维多利亚时代的连衣裙，那种穿在葬礼上的黑色连衣裙。如果你仔细观察这具标本，你会发现由于虫噬，她羽毛的末端已经渐渐损坏。这种羽毛末端的损坏是结束的开端，那些当年将鸟类做成标本的人没有考虑过，由于生物的有机特质，这些标本最终都将化作尘埃。