"My paintings bring together diverse visual languages within a single pictorial space, creating encounters between abstraction and representation, local and international histories, and different moments in time."
Painting provides a way for me to think about the movement of images across time, place and culture. My work draws upon a wide range of visual sources, including European modernism, colonial-era artworks, landscape painting and broader histories of cultural exchange. I am interested in what happens when images leave their original contexts, travel across geographic and cultural boundaries, and acquire new meanings and associations along the way.
My interest in this movement is inseparable from my own experience of migration. As Paul Carter observed, migrants never entirely arrive. They remain in an ongoing process of negotiating relationships between past and present, here and elsewhere. That condition has become an important lens through which I understand both contemporary experience and the lives of images.
Many of the artworks that find their way into my paintings are works I first encountered at significant moments in my own journeys. They operate as waymarkers, marking particular places, exhibitions, museums and encounters that have shaped my understanding of painting and its histories. I am interested in how such works continue to travel, not only through history and culture, but also through memory and personal experience.
Migratory aesthetics provides a methodology for this process. Rather than approaching images as fixed cultural artefacts, I treat them as mobile forms that are continually translated, adapted and reinterpreted. My paintings bring together diverse visual languages within a single pictorial space, creating encounters between abstraction and representation, local and international histories, and different moments in time.
There is a productive tension at the centre of the work. While paintings are physically static objects, they are capable of holding complex histories of movement, circulation and exchange. In this sense, painting becomes a place where images can continue their journeys, carrying traces of where they have been whilst remaining open to new encounters and meanings.
Neil Haddon is a British Australian painter based in Hobart, Tasmania. Following studies in England and a formative period living and working in Barcelona, Spain, he relocated to Tasmania in 1996. His work has been exhibited widely throughout Australia, including at the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and has also been presented in Europe and the United States. Research residencies have included the Australia Council Greene Street Studio in New York and, most recently, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His work is held in major public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. Career highlights include winning the Hadley's Art Prize (2018), the Glover Prize (2008), the City of Whyalla Art Prize (2009) and the City of Devonport Art Award (2006).