Neil Haddon The trees at Castra (first time)

This painting recalls a shift in my appreciation of John Glover’s wryly odd, curvilinear gum trees and a drive through the northwest Tasmanian coast hinterland. It draws on other journeys in this region, especially around Castra, and conflates these with histories of fraught colonial settlement, local newspaper accounts of first homebuyers and their acquisition of land and aspirations for the future.

The painting takes these complex, diverse layers of connection to Tasmania, ranging across personal experience, historical fact and anecdotal narrative and merges them together to form a visual account of the intricately subtle, emotive landscape of migratory experience.

- Neil Haddon, 2014