Neil Haddon is a recipient of the McCulloch Paris Studio residency, 2026, and will be in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts during May and June. Neil is undertaking a new project that probes Paul Gauguin’s floral still lifes through a practice he calls “aesthetic espionage,” combining covert museum observation, botanical fieldwork, and archival research. During his residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, he will gather visual intelligence across Paris—from museums to the Jardin des Plantes and the Serres d’Auteuil—before pairing this with comparative study in Tasmania to develop a new body of paintings that weave together borrowed motifs, local species, and the entangled histories of migration, colonial representation, and botanical imagery.
Flowers from Gauguín, 2026, oil on canvas, 91 x 81 cm