Bett Gallery, August 2024

‘the migrant does not arrive once and for all but continues to arrive, each new situation demanding a new set of responses, almost a new identity’

- Paul Carter, Living in a New Country: History, Travelling, Language.  

This perpetual arrival, an ongoing negotiation of self within shifting landscapes, lies at the heart of Neil Haddon's work.  In this exhibition, Haddon delves further into the legacies of his migration to lutruwita/Tasmania, weaving personal biography with complex negotiations of identity, belonging, and spatial relationships. For migrants, notions of place and belonging are often experienced as a perpetual state of flux; I belong here but I also belong there. In the realm of visual art, migratory aesthetics provide a lens through which to evoke these intricate dynamics. For Haddon, making paintings is a migratory practice that shifts and evolves. The aim is to create paintings that move through narratives of belonging and place, unsettling the histories of each.

Read the full essay here

More information: This Is No Fantasy

The Barracks, New Norfolk, 12/2/2022 to 27/2/2022

In When the Smoke Clears, Neil Haddon presents a new body of paintings that are influenced by his research into the life of James Kelly (1791 – 1851). Kelly was master mariner, whaler, and harbour master.

Although Haddon arrived in Australia more than twenty years ago, his experience of migration echoes that of Paul Carter, who writes, 'the migrant does not arrive once and for all but continues to arrive, each new situation demanding a new set of responses’. (1) When the term ‘migration’ is brought together with artistic production, it conjures up a distinctive way of working whose very nature is transitory, moving and unfixed. The project is situated within the field of ‘migratory aesthetics’, a form of artistic practice whose chief characteristics are spatial displacement and multi-temporality. The paintings in When the Smoke Clears employ the tools of migratory aesthetics, including the use of dislocated, fragmentary imagery, a compounded sense of past and present time, and memory, associations and representations formed elsewhere. The aim is to provide new purchase on stories and histories relating to Kelly, treating the historical record as a poorly understood territory yet to be discovered and named.

Some notes on When the Smoke Clears

Last year I read James Kelly's handwritten account of his 1815 circumnavigation of Tasmania, First Discovery of Port Davey and Macquarie Harbour. (2) This account was written at least six years after the events, probably longer. As Kelly and his crew rowed through the narrow entrance to a vast natural harbour on the West Coast of Van Diemen’s Land, they passed through clouds of smoke generated, Kelly speculates, by Tasmanian Aboriginal hunters. Kelly named the place ‘Macquarie Harbour’.

I also read The Remarkable Captain James Kelly of Van Diemen's Land by amateur historian Anthony Hope.

And a letter from James Bruni, Kelly's son, written while he and his younger brother were at boarding school in England. In the letter, the son asks his father to send him ‘a couple of knives and some marbles.’ (3) James Bruni was killed by a ‘blow from a whale’ when he was 21. (4) His brother, Tom, died in a boating accident on the River Derwent one year later when he was 16.

As the past pulls away and the future begins

I say goodbye to all that as the future rolls in

Like a wave

And the past with its savage undertow lets go (5)

I am a migrant to Tasmania. I wanted to enter the story of Kelly and his family as if I were discovering it for the first time, bringing to bear associations, empathies and memories formed elsewhere. Aspects of Kelly’s story have been woven together with mine, images from my background set in dialogue with his; at times critical, at times empathetic, often ambiguous and unclear, as if shrouded in smoke.

In The Pensive Image, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that some paintings ‘confront us in such a way that our wondering about the work of art – its subject of meaning – is transformed into our thinking according to it’. (6) A migratory way of thinking and working, the new response, becomes a tool for critical engagement.

This exhibition takes place on lutruwita (Tasmania) Aboriginal land, sea and waterways. I acknowledge, with deep respect the traditional owners of this land, the palawa people. I pay my respects to elders past and present and to the many Aboriginal people that did not make elder status and to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community that continue to care for Country. I recognise a history of truth which acknowledges the impacts of invasion and colonisation upon Aboriginal people resulting in the forcible removal from their lands. I acknowledge that visual culture and art played a part in that colonisation and stand for a future that respects and acknowledges Aboriginal perspectives, culture, language and history.

A selection of paintings in this exhibition will be shown at the Tongji University Museum, Shanghai, China in November 2022 alongside the work of Chen Ping and Anthony Hope. I am grateful to Chen Ping for initiating this project.

This project was assisted through Arts Tasmania, supported by the Tasmanian Government, and the University of Tasmania, School of Creative Arts and Media.

Neil Haddon, January 2022

1. Carter, P. 1992, Living in a New Country: History, Travelling, Language, Faber and Faber, London, p.6

2. Collection of the Royal Society of Tasmania, RS99/1

3. James Bruni Kelly, letter to his father, Collection of the Royal Society of Tasmania, RS7/91a

4. Inscription on the Kelly grave, St. David’s Park, Hobart

5. Nick Cave, Sun Forest, 2019

6. Grootenboer, H. The Pensive Image, 2020, p.6

For enquiries about the purchase of work in this exhibition please contact: info@bettgallery.com.au or nhaddon@netspace.net.au

Migratory Aesthetics, Pastiche and Painting: an exploration of migratory experience by Neil Haddon available here: https://eprints.utas.edu.au/37806

Paintings on display at the Henry Jones Art Hotel, Hobart.

More information: The Henry Jones Art Hotel

This work was part of the exhibition, publication and public forum 'Disappearing' at Bett Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania. The project presented an opportunity to pause and reflect on a distinctive moment in time on the islands of Tasmania. The painting and assemblage (co-designed with Leigh Woolley) explored how value is formed in terms like 'landscape' and 'townscape' in regard to the unique geographic location of Hobart. This collaborative research project built on existing work in migratory aesthetics (Haddon) and the theories of urban planning (Woolley), bringing these areas together to form questions around the framing of urban views; how these are formed, and by who. The work considered how landform characteristics underpin our experience of urban dwelling in Hobart/nipaluna and how colonial views of Mt Wellington/kunanyi continue to influence the city's planning.

The project used language shared between landscape painting and urban and environmental design to inform the production of a large scale, multi-media painting (Haddon), a speculative text (Woolley) and a co-designed engraved, free-standing acrylic panel. Together, these components presented a reflection on the landform horizons that define the city's edges and asked viewers to consider what outlooks, or viewing points, they seek out when orientating themselves with the urban domain. In addition, Haddon and Woolley's collaboration brought fresh perspectives on how the theories of migratory aesthetics and environmental design can be brought together to stimulate debate and provide affective purchase on the future of urban planning in Hobart/nipaluna.

The exhibition 'Disappearing' was curated by Dr Peter Hay, Carol Bett, and Gerald Castles and received public recognition via a review in The Mercury Newspaper and a public forum at the gallery. Haddon’s painting was subsequently acquired by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

Hackable Animals was a collaboration between Rob O’Connor, Meg Walch and Neil Haddon, held at Good Grief Gallery, Hobart, from February to March 2020.

Here is an extract from the text that accompanied the exhibition:

“Modernism is characterised by artists working in isolation. In the past, artisans would often belong to a guild, rather than working in seclusion. To this end, Haddon, O’Connor and Walch have formed their own guild: The Painters Guild of Hobart (not to be confused with the Hobart Guild of Painters).

Over the past eight months, the three artists have worked on a series of large-scale paintings, periodically swapping the ten canvases through their studios and responding to what the previous artist had produced. Haddon, O’Connor and Walch have hacked one another’s skills, guided by a loose rubric: each painted a ground, then passed it on - so all three took turns on the one canvas.

The ten paintings in this exhibition are works in progress. The three artists have orchestrated a collision of approaches; a black hole of content, in an effort to disrupt the preferences and outcomes that each individual artist might habitually make. The three artists gleefully undermine their own haphazard rules, creating disruption and schism that hacks comfortable practice; or the algorithms of artistic predictability. If painting is a form of subjective expression that embodies the artist's agency, then is this medium uniquely humanistic in relation to digital media?

Hackable Animals has challenged each artist with new ways of working and has produced unpredictable content and outcomes: “---a schizophrenic explosion… a monster truck of fuck… a goddamned monstrosity...”

In this first stage of the project there are no conclusions, only propositions: left

suspended, un-stretched, pinned, taped, with notations in the margins.

To finish a painting might be to kill it. And who, of the three, would be willing to make that call? Acts of erasure, defacement and alteration are equal motivations to marking territory – to the narcissism of “I Woz Here.”

Can this act of ‘unmaking’ paintings make space for interesting alternatives?

Nick Cave writes, "Humour is the Trojan horse that crosses the moat and infiltrates the castle, bringing with it the unsayable." However, our painterly pantomime is more than a theatre of the absurd. Absurdity is a category of realism that remains vital in the face of our self-erasure. The project is a generous one, we will invite others to join us. To this end, we have revived Chris Bury’s ‘Painters Guild of Hobart’ for starters.

The Guild’s first project is Hackable Animals.

Bett Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania

November 15th to December 7th 2019

For some time now, I have been drawn to thinking about my life as a migrant to Tasmania. It’s odd; how long it can take to realise that the subtle undercurrent of difference that has pervaded my life here could be used more purposefully as a tool for critical thinking.

The physical displacement of migration is often accompanied by a mental one when the thoughts, feelings and associations attached to one place are removed to another, new place. The artist and theorist Mieke Bal describes this dual physical and mental displacement as a heterochronic experience of time or, a disruption in the regular flow of time. My interpretation of this is that, as a migrant, I am perpetually aware of two (or more) time zones; the time of the old place and the time of the new place.

How can the time of the migrant be made in a painting?

The paintings in this exhibition are made using a form of collage; the cutting of a pictorial element from a source and pasting it into a new composition, often with other collaged elements. The paintings present a seemingly haphazard array of pictorial references derived from multiple historic periods, all of which have a biographical connection to me.

There is an image of a placard holding bible salesman and racegoers enjoying a boozy lunch at the Epsom Derby (the ‘race’ of the exhibition title). There is a recumbent Eve in the Garden of Eden and the imaginary future ruins of London. These images have been copied from Gustave Doré’s illustrations in the books London: A Pilgrimage (1872) and Paradise Lost (1898). I have used them as pictures of the old place; a place that is both geographically and temporally distant to me now. I was born and raised in Epsom on the outskirts of South West London.

The paintings also include elements derived from Paul Gauguín’s Mata Mua (1892), a partially fictionalised account of Gaugín’s new home in Tahiti. For me, the painting is an important marker of my own migratory journey having first seen it when I lived in Spain, then again, decades later when temporarily living in New York and, more recently on a trip to Madrid. These fragments find themselves amongst strangely symmetrical trees taken from a painting by John Glover (1832). Glover’s tree has been copied and flipped to produce an exotic new species that looks as European as it does Antipodean.

This assortment of subjects is complemented by different painting techniques including digital printing on spray-painted grounds, refined hand-painted detail and loosely expressive gesture. The collision of images and techniques creates a turbulent, non-linear temporal dimension that is nonetheless held together in a field of highly saturated, unworldly colour.

The ‘shore’ of the exhibition title refers to a rocky shore, painted as if standing with one’s back to the ocean looking inland to a challenging topography. This is an apt location to consider the experience of migration. It is intertidal; neither fully land nor fully ocean, characterised by diversity and adaptability. It is two places at once and can be difficult terrain to traverse.

Neil Haddon, 2019

We bring our own fires an installation of 8 paintings as part of Remanence a Ten Days on the Island exhibition curated by Noel Frankham, Kit Wise, Svenja Kratz and Zoe Veness.

http://tendays.org.au/event/remanence/

MONA - June 23 2012-April 8 2013

La Maison Rouge, Paris - 19 OCTOBER 2013 - 12 JANUARY 2014

Theatre of the World engages, and rejects, the widely held notion that ancient and contemporary works of art are inherently different, and that we must burden the past with the weight of history.

Theatre of the World is a kaleidoscope: here the viewer sees the object, and that is enough. This notion harkens back to the Renaissance view that art and knowledge are inextricably intertwined. This art is visual poetry.

Theatre of the World has, as its backbone, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery collection of Pacific barkcloths and Mona’s collection of everything. Other sources are tapped when required to enhance the perceptual interplay, or on whim.

In the theatre of the world art is a conveyor of dreams, a mobilizer of imagination, and a conduit for emotion. When we find beauty sometimes we need look no further.

Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin.

A MONA and TMAG (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) collaboration.

Neil Haddon

9 Nov - 11 Dec 2016

Neil Haddon’s recent paintings employ a collage-like approach to imagery derived from a variety of seemingly incongruous sources. They present abstracted, tenuous ‘landscapes’ in which we are free to consider how meaning is made when the supporting contexts for that imagery are strange to us. This work draws on Haddon’s experience as a migrant to Tasmania (via six years in Spain) and the ways that migrants find their own poetic meaning in the unfamiliar contexts of their new home.

The paintings use diverse materials and processes to conflate fragments of artworks by Paul Gauguín, John Glover and others, bringing them together within abstracted constructions to picture an unstable ‘Tasmanian landscape’. Here, meaning is in a constant state of flux and is perpetually renegotiated according to the influences of where one once was and where one finds oneself now.

PROPOSAL FOR AN EXHIBITION OF ARTWORKS, INFLIGHT GALLERY, NOVEMBER 2012 – NEIL HADDON 

This is a proposal for a solo exhibition of artworks ranging across a variety of media including video, digital prints, assemblage and painting. The nature of this work would be experimental (departing from habitual concerns) and would seek to liberate and question the formal approaches of my work of the past several years. This is best explained by providing two rationales, one that captures conceptual concerns of recent work and one that proposes directions for new, experimental work.

Full Text

Dianne Tanzer Gallery Melbourne, 2011

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” – Cormac McCarthy, The Road.

Ashley Crawford - Broken - Full Text