Remnance (Ten days on the island 2017)

We Bring Our Own Fires

1832 John Glover paints the smoke from a corroboree

1834 Turner paints two paintings of the burning of the Houses of Parliament

1967 I was born. Southern Tasmania burns.

1976 I see catastrophic forest fires in Southern England after two years of drought.

Neil Haddon's paintings draw on his experience as a migrant to Tasmania and explore how migrants create their own poetic meanings from the unfamiliar narratives of a new home. He employs a collage-like approach to painting, drawing on a variety of incongruous sources in a dynamic process of movement, relocation, fragmentation, and recombination. In these paintings, meaning is in flux and is continually renegotiated according to the diverse cultural influences of both origin and current setting. The viewer is invited to consider how meaning is constructed when the context supporting that imagery feels unfamiliar.

These paintings depict a process of cultural rebuilding following a cataclysmic event. Fragments of artworks—among them J.M.W. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons and John Glover’s Corrobery of Natives in Mills Plains—are combined with fragments of biography and anecdotal memory to form the building blocks of a newly constructed "Tasmanian landscape," though an abstracted and unstable one. The installation of paintings in the former art studio suggests a sense of abandonment, as if the paintings and the room were left behind in haste.