Last but no least
Exhibition at This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne
Ali Tahayori, Johnathon World Peace Bush, Neil Haddon, Olivia Chin
5 - 20 Dec 2025
Last But Not Least brings together a selection of THIS IS NO FANTASY’s gallery artists whose practices approach transformation, perception, and cultural memory from distinctly charged vantage points. Presented at the close of the year, the exhibition reframes the idea of “last” not as an ending, but as a distillation – a moment where ideas sharpen, surfaces deepen, and meaning gathers intensity.
Neil Haddon’s vibrant, shape-shifting paintings disrupt familiar visual languages, pulling abstraction and representation into tense, luminous dialogue.
Ali Tahayori continues his exploration of queer identity, sensory experience, and diasporic memory, using light, image, and spatial intervention to create spaces of reflection and intimacy.
From Tiwi Islands cosmology to contemporary political commentary, Johnathon World Peace Bush’s bold, emblematic works assert painting as a site of sovereignty, humour, and relentless presence.
Olivia Chin‘s paintings explore landscapes with gesture, movement, and quiet symbolism that chart emotional terrains that hover between the seen and the felt.
Across these diverse practices, Last But Not Least asks what accumulates at the edge of conclusion – what remains, what resists closure, and what continues to unfold. Together, the artists offer a resonant final chord for the year: layered, searching, and insistently alive.
Constance ARI Archive
Constance ARI Archive
Opening 10 October, 5.30PM
Contemporary Art Tasmania,
27 Tasma St, North Hobart TAS 7000.
Featuring: Neil Haddon, Matt Warren, Grace Gamage, Jacob Leary, Robert O'Connor, Selena de Carvalho, Georgia Lucy, Scot Cotterell, and Caitlin Fargher.
The Constance ARI Archive exhibition brings together artists from across the life of the organisation — from its early days as Inflight to its current form as Constance 22 years later. This intergenerational assembly of practices reflects the shifting, cyclical nature of artist-run culture: its ruptures, renewals and the communities that sustain it.
The exhibition coincides with the launch of the Constance Online Archive. Rejecting fixed hierarchies of record keeping, the archive proposes memory as a shared, living process — one that documents not only projects, but the conditions, relationships and entanglements that shape them. In this way, the archive proposes a site of resistance and reimagining, exploring the porous boundaries between art, place and collective care.
The opening event will be a celebration of the Constance community and its many contributors. Join us for an evening of live performance, sharing food, and limited-edition merchandise making as we mark the launch of the online archive and exhibition at Contemporary Art Tasmania. This is a moment to gather, reflect, and activate — to honour the many forms Constance has taken, and the artists who continue to shape its future.
Curated by
Bonni Que, Hannah Foley & Jade Irvine
Archive web design by
Jonny Scholes
Supported by Arts Tasmania and Contemporary Art Tasmania (CAT)
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Opening
5.30pm, Friday 10th October
Performance by DÜO (Matt Warren & Scot Cotterell)
Barbecue from 6pm
Exhibition continues
11 - 25th October
Wednesday—Saturday
12—5pm
Location:
Contemporary Art Tasmania
27 Tasma St, nipaluna (Hobart)
constanceari.org
Talking with painters interview
Many thanks to Maria Stoljar for this interview. Snippet below. Full interview here: https://talkingwithpainters.com/2025/10/04/ep-169-12-finalists-12-landscape-paintings/
A view of water, 2025, 140 x 130 cm, acrylic, oil and lacquer on aluminium panel
Hadley's Art Prize 2025
Finalist exhibition 29 August - 21 September 2025, Open 10am - 4pm daily
From my studio in Nipaluna/West Hobart, I can see a sliver of Timtumili Minanya/Derwent Estuary—a glimpse that, on occasion, carries me back to stories of the colonial whaling industry’s devastating toll. This painting recalls that view, combining it with the fate of James Bruni Kelly, aged 21, killed by a blow from a whale in 1841. My view is entangled within fragments of a painting by William Duke, which hangs in TMAG - the museum that stands between me and the water. The view is fractured, partial and never wholly grasped; still waiting to be fully interpreted.
One Day Book Sale (and some work on paper)
I’m parting with over 200 books — art books, monographs, exhibition catalogues, theory, novels and more — ranging from rare collector’s items to freebies looking for a good home. Alongside the books, I’ll have a few works on paper on the walls, all available for sale. In the spirit of a garage sale...
This sale marks my departure from UTAS and the downsizing of my former office into a too-small house! Come by to browse, pick up something special (or something free), and help these books and artworks find new homes. One day only. Details here: Book Sale
Wayfaring / Painting / Undertow
Review by Gina Fairley at Arts Hub:
WAYFARING / PAINTING / UNDERTOW
BETT GALLERY, opening Thursday 1.8.24
Good Grief
Friday June 14th - 5:30–11:00pm One night only art exhibition & birthday shenanigans. Food/DJ’s/Art.
Nothing a human heart has loved will be lost (for HG Wells), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 65 cm
Everything Else, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 165 x 132 cm
They asked me for a one-night stand. How thrilling, I thought:
(a moment of pleasure, vivid connection versus lasting impression,
desire and regret, the immediacy of the present, and the undertow of the past).
Before he died, H.G. Wells wrote, "Nothing a human heart has loved will be lost."
So, I took an old painting and partially erased it.
Then I took an old canvas, painted it black, and added everything else.
Nothing and everything, for one night only.
O R B I T
This Is No Fantasy
Nothing a Human Heart (for H.G. Wells) No. 4, 2023
ＯＲＢＩＴ
18 MAY - 10 JUNE 2023
JOHNATHON WORLD PEACE BUSH | CHRIS BOND | SIMON DEGROOT | BADRA AJI | YHONNIE SCARCE
ALI TAHAYORI | PHUONG NGO | JUAN FORD | JILL ORR | JO PLANK | VINCENT NAMATJIRA | EZZ MONEM
PETRINA HICKS | BENJAMIN AITKEN | JANELLE LOW | ALEXANDRA STANDEN | OLIVER WATTS | NEIL HADDON
_____________
#thisisnofantasy
This Is No Fantasy 2023
When the smoke clears
This Is No Fantasy, 16/3/23 to 6/4/23
‘Entering Macquarie Harbour (the smoke was so thick), 2022, oil, acrylic and lacquer on aluminium panel, 140 cm x 130 cm
Entering Macquarie Harbour (the smoke was so thick)
Finalist in the Hadley’s Art Prize 2022, 23 July – 21 August, Open 10am – 4pm daily, Hadley’s Orient Hotel
Nothing a human heart (for H.G. Wells), 77.5 x 62 cm, acrylic, pen and lacquer on aluminium panel
Sulman Prize 2022, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Neil Haddon
Nothing a human heart has loved (for H.G. Wells)
Oil, acrylic and lacquer on aluminium
The Happy Turning by British writer H.G. Wells was published in 1945, the year before he died. In this short book, perhaps in anticipation of his demise, he writes: “nothing a human heart has loved will ever be lost”.
I first read Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) decades ago as a boy in a dusty school room back in England. The introductory pages of this book, set in the leafy green environs of my upbringing, mention Tasmania (where I now live) and the decimation of Aboriginal peoples by invading Europeans.
I understand Wells’ sentiment about the human heart, and I don’t, in equal measure.
Neil Haddon, 2022
We Will Bring Our Own Views (and our own plans), 2018-2021,
oil and digital print on aluminium panels, 180 cm x 240 cm
D i s a p p e a r i n g
Tasmanian Writers, Tasmanian Painters engage with what is lost and what endures
Disappearing
We’ve long had a secret here.
Disappearing : to cease to be seen; vanish from sight; to cease to exist or be known; pass away; end gradually.
In our islands, their past, the land, seas, the movement of air, its peoples, the cadence of life and in the place itself is something unfathomably beautiful. You sense it as much as see it. It’s about connection and time not the here and now. It’s a secret that has been closely held, cherished, sustaining our soul.
Entwined with that secret has been a hope that one day Tasmania would be recognised, acknowledged and able to stand on its own two feet. This has been elusive but now we are told that perhaps it is so close as to be reckoned by the beads on the accountant’s abacus.
Then again, perhaps not. Is the price we are paying a disappearing, a disappearing of the very stuff that sustains us? Or, is it a more complex story, shedding a skin as part of the inexorable march of renewal?
Disappearing.
We are at a unique time in our life on these islands of Tasmania; forced to pause, reflect, revaluate, to consider, to reset, to look again at where we live with new eyes.
Over the last few decades Bett Gallery has explored what it means to live or have lived in this place we now call Tasmania in a series of important exhibitions including Future Perfect, South of No North and six Poets and Painters exhibitions.
It is time to again look deeply into this place.
A group of Tasmanian artists and writers were invited to join curators Carol Bett, Gerard Castles and Pete Hay to explore the idea of what it means to be Tasmanian, our island and who we are and might be as islanders at this moment in our unfolding story.
Exhibition dates: 13 March to 31 March 2021
Join participating writers as they read in the gallery
Saturday 13 March, 2021, 2.30pm - 4pm
$5 entry to be donated to Hobart City Mission to support those facing hardship and homelessness
Entry numbers will be COVID capped
Participating artists and writers in conversation
Wednesday 24 March, 2021, 6pm - 7.30pm
$5 entry to be donated to Hobart City Mission to support those facing hardship and homelessness
Entry numbers will be COVID capped
Bett Gallery thanks:
Heather Rose and Michaye Boulter
Simon Bevilacqua and Tim Burns
Rachel Leary and Helen Wright
Greg Lehman and Brigita Ozolins
James Dryburgh and Richard Wastell
Ben Walter and Tom O’Hern
Danielle Wood and David Keeling
Katherine Johnson and Amanda Davies
Leigh Woolley and Neil Haddon
Carol Patterson Amber Koroluk -Stephenson
Jenny Weber and Matt Coyle
Level 1 / 65 Murray Street
Hobart Tas 7000
T: +61 (0) 3 6231 6511
E: info@bettgallery.com.au
Sawtooth ARI fundraiser auction
I have some work in the auction to raise funds for Sawtooth ARI. Jump online and have a look.
The Fruit (no.8), 2020, acrylic paint on paper.
The Ruins of London, 2019, acrylic, oil, enamel and digital print on aluminium.
Review of 'the shore, the race, the other place'
Many thanks to Phantasm Gallery for this review of ‘the shore, the race, the other place’ at Bett Gallery back in November. https://phantasmgallery.com.au/haddon/
The Painters Guild of Hobart presents Hackable Animals
Neil Haddon, Robert O’Connor, Megan Walch
Good Grief Studios, Hobart
https://www.hackableanimals.net
https://www.facebook.com/events/1522162067939071/
Art Guide Preview - Briony Downes
https://artguide.com.au/the-shore-the-race-the-other-place
the shore, the race, the other place
Neil Haddon at Bett Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania 15.11.19 to 7.12.19
http://www.bettgallery.com.au
Hadleys Art Prize 2019
Our Rocky Shore has been selected for the Hadley’s Art Prize 2019. The painting will be on display from 20.7.19 to 18.8.19
Our Rocky Shore, 2019, oil, enamel, vinyl and digital print on aluminium panel, 130 cm x 122 cm