NEIL HADDON
Neil Haddon moved to Tasmania in 1996 from Barcelona where he had been working as an artist and teacher for six years. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia and internationally. His work is held in several private and public collections, such as Artbank, Sydney, The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the University of Tasmania, and the Gold Coast Arts Centre (acquired from the Conrad Jupiter’s Art Award). Haddon’s painting Survivor was the winning entry in the City of Devonport Art Award 2006. In 2002 he was awarded a MFA from the University of Tasmania and since 1999 has lectured at the school.
Neil Haddon's work contains traces of multiple landscapes, of merged images and histories. His experience as a migrant to Tasmania, as it is for many, is one of dislocation, dissonance and a lack of deep connection with endemic stories. His paintings explore the emotional complexities and difficulties of depicting meaningful narratives connected to place.
Haddon employs tactics of infiltration and re-deployment. He applies these to the dominant narratives of the mass media via the ‘minor language’ of painting. His methodology redistributes images taken from minor stories in local newspapers within the ambiguity of painting. He locates their underlying structures and empties them of their plausible content and then paints new, melodramatic departures from the original stories. He avoids detail that inhibits the process of imaginative engagement with story and consequently perpetuates a state of continual re-reading.
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