Residency: Cité internationale des arts, Paris

Neil Haddon

1 May - 31 Jul 2026

Neil Haddon is a recipient of the McCulloch Paris Studio residency, 2026, and will be in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts during May and June. Neil is undertaking a new project that probes Paul Gauguin’s floral still lifes through a practice he calls “aesthetic espionage,” combining covert museum observation, botanical fieldwork, and archival research. During his residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, he will gather visual intelligence across Paris—from museums to the Jardin des Plantes and the Serres d’Auteuil—before pairing this with comparative study in Tasmania to develop a new body of paintings that weave together borrowed motifs, local species, and the entangled histories of migration, colonial representation, and botanical imagery.

“At the Cité Internationale des Arts, I’ve been working on paper, pulling apart details from Gauguin’s ‘Bouquet de fleurs’ (1897, Musée Marmottan) and letting those fragments drift into new compositions. The studio has become a place for small playful watercolours — Gauguin’s bouquet spliced into Matisse‑like shapes, all mingling with images of other migrations happening just outside the building. Some pieces spill onto packing cardboard, the “FRAGÍL” warnings echoing the precarious migrant workers’ shelters and becoming part of the work’s surface and story. Much of the residency has been about returning — to the studio, to that same painting at the Musée d’Orsay, to the slow act of looking until something unexpected surfaces. The conversations and studio visits with fellow residents, including Wolfgang Tillmans and fellow Australian, Sid Pattni, have been about discovering each other’s work in progress — the processes, the hesitations, the experiments, the many voices gathered here. All of this has folded into my ongoing thinking about migratory aesthetics and how images travel, shift, and reappear in new forms.

A residency is a strange thing, in the sense of an estrangement, from ones normal routines and patterns, of family sounds, smells, tastes; this voluntary displacement is provocative but, for me, it is still too fresh to say what might emerge from this time ‘away’. As with my residency at the Greene Street Studio in New York some years ago, the impact may take time to become clear or it may persist as an undercurrent of drifting memory and recall.” – Neil Haddon, 2026