On until Dec 11th at This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne

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.