HADLEY’S ART PRIZE
HADLEY'S ART PRIZE 2018
Hadley’s Orient Hotel 34 Murray St, Hobart Until August 25
T he inaugural $100,000 Hadley’s Art Prize competition was an exciting event in the Tasmanian art calendar last year. It attracted 385 entrants from all over the country, which was narrowed to a field of 41 works. The finalists showcased some strong and fascinating art: the diversity of technique, concept and approach to making work gave us a rich experience, and one that was truly contemporary.
Having set the bar high, the 2018 prize, which is awarded to what is deemed to be the best portrayal of the Australian landscape that acknowledges the past, was going to be interesting indeed. This year’s competition attracted a large field of more than 600 entrants, which was whittled down to a finalists’ group of just 31 works. A difficult task, but what has been selected manages to demonstrate how complex landscape art is in Australia right now: a diverse melting pot of cultures and ideas.
Walking through the show is almost like reading a well-constructed essay: there’s a lot of stimulation to be gleaned from how engagingly the selected works meld together to create a narrative. Some works stand out: Milan Milojevic’s Terra Incognita achieved the recognition of the inaugural Hadley’s Packing Room Prize, and is a fine example of this exemplary artist’s current output.
Other notable works are David Beaumont’s vivid painting of William Buckley; Kulawa by Eva Nargoodah, a rich depiction of growth in the monsoon season; Jennifer Riddle’s Verdant
Garden, a chaotic evocation of mist and silence; and Betty Kuntiwa Pumani’s Antara, which is a complex, swirling dedication to her ancestors and the passing on of knowledge.
Neil Haddon, winner of the Hadley’s Prize for 2018, is a deeply cerebral artist, who came here as a migrant from the UK. He is a teacher, and will be familiar to many Tasmanian artists. He’s known for using collage-based techniques to make his images, and while they often contain elements that we associate with landscape, this is not traditional landscape art.
Haddon gives us a landscape of the mind: he uses collage and historical research to construct his work. Here we see HG Wells cycling through a Tasmanian landscape constructed from elements of the works of Glover and Gauguin. Wells opened his War of
the Worlds with a paragraph that mentions the attempted genocide of Tasmanian Aboriginal People. Haddon folds history together in this work, questions how art histories have depicted landscapes, and what the reality is that lies underneath: we might see this as a landscape that undermines the traditions of landscape art. It’s an exciting choice, but this is what the Hadley’s Prize is about.